Photography, Time-lapse

Projects, posts!

Before getting the site all setup, there were a number of posts that I’ve been thinking about writing. As outlined in the first post, I wanted to use this site as a way to communicate various personal projects that I’m either working on or planning to work on. Also wanted to use it as a means to write about interesting topics.

For a few months now, I’ve been playing around with the Arduino. It’s been some time since I’ve done any electronics work… Well, back in college I had taken Physics Electronics Lab, which covered the principles of analog circuits, and Digital Systems Design, which covered the principles of digital circuits. Getting back into electronics has been quite fun, especially with the Arduino. I’ll have post coming up discussing my mini-electronics lab that I setup in the garage and resources I found helpful for getting back into electronics.

Around the same time that I started to get back into electronics, I heard on TWiP from one of Ron Brinkmann’s “Picks of the Week” about the OpenMoCo project. For those unfamiliar, the purpose of that project was to create an open source motion control system using the Arduino as the controller, and (semi-) off-the-shelf parts to create a lower cost dolly/rig for capturing video or photos for time-lapse. I’ve been reading quite a bit about this in my spare time and have started to design and source parts for my version of such a rig. There will be a number of upcoming posts about this work.

Lastly, there have been a few article that have come through my daily RSS feed that caught my attention. For those, I wanted to share some thoughts. So there will be some of those posts coming up as well.

Photography, Solarography

First attempt at solargraphy

Earlier this year, there was a cool article on LifeHacker about taking ultra-long exposures using a pinhole camera to capture the sun’s path through the sky.  A few days later I emailed Tarja Trygg of the Solargraphy site about trying some exposures from my home.   He graciously offered to send me a camera that he constructed.   A few weeks later I received 3 cameras to capture the sun’s tracks through the sky in the Spring.

Pinhole cameras
Pinhole cameras

In order to keep the cameras in-place for the 3-month duration of spring (March 20, 2010 to June 21, 2010), I constructed a simple rig to insert the cameras in place.  This rig consisted of pieces of cedar purchased from the scrap wood bin at Home Depot, with holes drilled just deep enough to hold the film canister cameras in place.  The rig was then mounted to the overhang of my roof using clamps.

Mounting apparatus
Mounting apparatus

Below are the results of the 3-month long exposures.  While the rig that was constructed held the cameras in-place for the duration of the exposure, the rig shows up in the photos.  For future experiments, this rig needs to be modified so that it is not visible or minimally visible to the camera.

Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #1
Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #1
Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #2
Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #2
Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #3
Spring 2010 Solargraphy, Camera #3

Results of this shoot are also now posted to the Solargraphy site!