A week or so ago, I bought a cheapo remote electronic timer for my Canon Rebel XTi from eBay as a device to play around with creating animations. It was about $15, shipping included, so if it didn’t work or failed miserably, it wasn’t much of a loss. It is, essentially, a knock-off of Canon’s Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3 which, even at B&H, is $136, about ten times more. (Love you and your gear, Canon, but come on.)

The no-name (literally) timer has two modes, in essence. Firstly, you can use it as a remote control to take photos instead of pressing the camera’s shutter button. It plugs in the side of the camera and has its own shutter button. This button can be locked open for those fancy night-time shots (aka, BULB mode). So it’s great for those shots where you have the camera on a tripod and are taking a long exposure – you run less of a risk of jogging the camera.

Secondly, and more interestingly, it can operate in timer mode. Essentially you program in a delay to start shooting, a long-exposure time (you can set this to zero to allow the camera to decide), an interval between shots, and the number of shots to take. Hit the start button and the timer takes over, taking the number of shots you specified with the required exposure times, intervals, and initial delay. Great for taking a series of astronomy pictures: set up your camera on a tripod, program the device, plug it in, then go inside and have a cuppa to warm up.

But that’s not what I bought it for. I bought it to play around with animations. For a quick experiment this lunchtime, I programmed it to snap shots every 10 seconds, and then moved pentomino pieces step by step in the field of view so that they “solved” themselves. I imported the 70-odd shots into Camtasia (I have a license from work) and created this YouTube video.

All right, I admit, Pixar are not going to come calling. It was a definite experiment. Lessons I learned were as follows:

• Set the camera to its lowest resolution. Using RAW is a waste of space on the card for this kind of work. Think about it like this: to get 24 fps, you’ll be taking 1440 pictures for every minute of animation. Unless you like downloading images from your storage card or you are trying to impress the folks at Pixar, stick to a low resolution. For my 8GB CF card (the maximum the XTi will take), that’s 5000 photos at the lowest resolution (1936 × 1288 pixels) – still higher than 1080p.
• Pay more attention to the view. I had the camera at an angle: it would have been much better had I had the camera pointing vertically downwards. You can also see quite clearly that I didn’t have the finishing position in the center of the frame. Hello? Is this amateur hour?
• Use manual focus not automatic focus. I was a little slow at getting my hand out of the way as I advanced the pieces and you can see the camera had focused on something else in a couple of frames. (The timer “half-presses” the shutter button 2 seconds before taking the shot, to allow the autofocus to do its work.)
• TechSmith’s Camtasia is perhaps not the best program for creating a video from a set of frames. When importing a set of images like this, all you can really do is set the default duration that each image shows (I used 0.2 seconds to make 5 fps). If you want to do something fancier, you’re out of luck. I should research a better (simpler?) program.
• Don’t be afraid to move the items a smaller distance for each frame. That also means take more frames. With setup and the 70 shots, it took about 20 minutes to take the pictures. With about 10 minutes processing time, that was about all I could afford during lunch. With a weekend doing this, I could get a smoother flow.
• Doing animation of plastic pieces on a smooth polished table top is just frustrating. Things slide way too easily. Grrr.
• Yeah, the timer isn’t needed. I could quite as easily shot the pictures one by one manually. Still undecided as to whether the timer helped or hindered. I used an interval of 10 seconds so I didn’t feel rushed, and it was fine. I also felt I could just concentrate on the moving the pieces, rather than move a piece, take a photo, rinse, repeat.

But, nevertheless, I’m encouraged by it. I’ll continue playing.

Last September, we stayed in Richmond, North Yorkshire, for a few days in order to go visit the graves of my parents – it had been the first opportunity for us to see the gravestones and to pay our respects. As is normal the day we arrive in England, Donna was really tired (it’s an effect of the travel medication she takes), and so I left her napping and went on a little walk around Richmond, a town that, although I knew superficially around the market place and the Castle, was not one I’d explored in any great depth.

We were staying at the Frenchgate Restaurant & Hotel which is, appropriately enough, on Frenchgate, a cobbled cul-de-sac that was once an important thoroughfare, but which was now sidetracked by the main road through Richmond. I can well recommend this hotel-restaurant, we enjoyed every moment and every meal we were there. The room we had was great (I love heated floors in bathrooms) and very cosy and quiet. The staff were extremely welcoming. Quite a find, and we will certainly be staying there this September again. Anyway…

This is the view down Frenchgate (behind me is the stairs up to the A6108, aka Pottergate). The sign you can see on the right is the hotel and, of course, in the middle distance is Richmond Castle.

Right at the top is a side path going down the hill, known as Lombard’s Wynd (pronounced wind as in a winding path, not wind as in a breeze). It broadens out in a little while to a narrow street.

An old schoolhouse on Lombard’s Wynd. It’s now a private house but as far as I can gather it was an old primary school. Not sure when it was closed down.

After crossing the old Railway bridge (as in, the bridge that led to Richmond Railway Station – now no longer a station), I dropped down to the River Swale and took this picture of the Castle…

…and this picture of Richmond Lower School through the arches of the bridge.

I then crossed back over the bridge, and walked through the park along the river bank. This was on the side of a house at the end of Park Wynd – I just love the typography.

Then it was time to walk up Millgate towards the Castle.

Unfortunately Castle Wynd was blocked by construction (a house was being renovated), but I snapped number 1. I can’t remember exactly, but I think number 2 was up those stone stairs to the side.

After that I walked into the Market Place, past Mum & Dad’s solicitors at the end of Millgate, and up past the King’s Head, which, I must admit, had a remarkable show of flowers.

It was getting a bit late at that point, the sun was going down, so I walked down Ryders Wynd to Frenchgate and took this picture of St Mary’s Parish Church in the evening light before returning to the hotel.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Kickstarter recently. One of the projects I offered to fund was originally called Red Pop, a gizmo that attached to your iPhone to (a) give it a better grip like a normal camera, and (b) have a nice physical button on top to take photos. They reached their funding, got asked by Red to rename it to avoid any confusion (which they did, to POPA), and then eventually released it. (The following photo is courtesy Beep Industries.)

I finally got mine a couple of weeks ago. There’s also an app you download to provide the software support for the button grip. You essentially push the grip onto the phone (there’s a standard iPhone connector in the grip). It’s a nice tight fit so it doesn’t fall off. Pushing the grip onto the phone starts the app. After that, you’ve got yourself a phone that looks a bit like like a retro camera. The app takes photos, has its own camera roll, and you can share photos in the usual social networking manner from within the app.

So what do I think? First of all, I find it really easy to take photos with the phone now. Before POPA, I would find it hard to keep the device steady and also touch the shutter release button on the screen. For some reason, the act of pressing the button jogged the phone, which meant I was prone to taking blurry pictures. The app itself works well, although it’s a little annoying to have two camera rolls. You can however save individual photos to the standard roll, which makes it easier to use another photo app to process them in various ways, say with CameraBag.

The grip also has a standard tripod mount of the bottom, so you can use your iPhone on a monopod or tripod if you want.

The main downside is that you have to remember to carry the grip with you at all times. It does come in a little bag so you can stuff it in a pocket. You can’t keep the grip mounted all the time since it blocks off the mic, so you can’t take phone calls without having to whip it off. The other thing is that the grip is very tight. Putting it on for the first few times made me afraid I was going to scratch or damage the phone.

Apart from that the real problem is the price. It’s £50. Yep, fifty quid, not bucks. Which translates to around $85 once you factor in the shipping from England. (I got mine through my Kickstarter funding of $75.) Belkin have their LiveAction Camera Grip which, although not perhaps as good looking, has the same functionality. It’s $50 but can be found cheaper if you look (at the time of writing Best Buy have it for $10 off and free shipping).

I’ll also note that, with iOS 5 you can take pictures using the volume up button on the side of the phone. I’d have to say the “pushing down” rather than the “pushing away” action is the main factor in stabilizing the phone for me to take sharper pictures. So. maybe I just don’t need this external grip any more, although it does feel comfortable to hold. Let’s say 7/10 stars.

As regards my Kickstarter experience, not bad. Beep Industries kept us well informed about the progress (the grip went through a couple of changes as they geared up for manufacture) and there were a couple of videos to keep us wanting more. The only issue I have at the moment (which I’ll admit that I haven’t complained about) is that at the level I and 429 others funded, we were promised “You will also get your name 'in lights' and an image of your choice added to the ‘Thank You -You Rock! gallery’ on our Red Pop website.” Nope. Hasn’t happened. Oh well.

The other iPhone photo accessory I recently purchased was the Glif. (The following photos are courtesy Studio Neat.)

This is a pretty simple, yet nicely designed, accessory. You can either use it as a tripod mount like this (the iPhone just slides in, both portrait or landscape):

Or as a stand like this for watching videos and the like:

As I said, pretty simple and very nifty. Easy to carry around (you just keep it on the phone itself; it doesn’t get in the way). And a mere $20. There’s also the Glif+ which provides an extra perpendicular clip in case you’re worried the phone will fall out of the Glif and a screw-in eye for the tripod mount so you can attach it to a keyring or something. This one is a 9/10 for me.

About a month ago (I was at the DevLink conference), I heard about an iPhone app called 360 Panorama that takes panoramic pictures. The way it does it is quite intuitive once you realize that it takes a series of pictures and then stitches them together in software to produce a single JPG.

In essence, to use it you get a grid-like field of view that you fill with photos. In good light, you can let the program do its thing as you slowly sweep your field of view, holding the phone upright; there’s no need to continue clicking the button. It’s almost like panning a video camera.

During our recent vacation to England (the Peak District, to be exact), we went to Bolsover Castle. Here’s a 180° panorama, taken from the ramparts outside the “Little Castle”, west over to the Peak District:

(Click to enlarge all photos.)

Not too bad, methinks. I was a little rushed though: there was a sudden rain shower and I wanted to get under cover.

Here’s another 180° panorama showing the entrance courtyard minutes later after the shower (note the nicely glistening cobbles…):

Here I had more time to add a couple more sweeps to the panorama, top and bottom, to fill the grid further.

Finally – at least for that that trip – I took a true 360° panorama outside in the outer courtyard:

If you view the panoramas on the phone in the app, you can view them in “real-time”. You hold up the phone exactly the way you’d taken the photos and you can mimic the panning around you originally did. So you can turn your body round and the app shows you the view in that direction. It’s kind of fun.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the stitching together feature. It does a really good job in my view: it’s hard to notice the joins in the panoramas I’ve shown here. although there are some obvious join defects. I think I’ll be adding this to my standard photography setup when we go visit places like Bolsover Castle. Yes, the individual detailed photos are great, but the panorama doesn’t half give you a sense of the scale of a place.

photo © 2007 Beverly | more info(via: Wylio)Wylio is this great little online tool for inserting photos into your blog posts. In essence, it allows you to search for photos published on Flickr under the Creative Commons license (“you are free to use the content providing you give proper attribution”), resize them to whatever size would look good in your blog, and then it will generate the HTML code for insertion into your post. It adds the correct attribution and links to the original source as a caption to the image. You then copy & paste that HTML code into your blog post. Just like the example to the right, showing Pikes Peak through a rock formation at Garden of the Gods.

Works just great with Windows Live Writer too. You just switch to the source view and paste in the copied HTML. Morceau de gâteau.

I love this: a simple app, well executed, that just saves you a boatload of time. I wonder how easy it would be to use the idea to create a plug-in to WLW.

I’ve been a bit remiss in posting these photos, but a friend reminded me yesterday that I’d promised to show off my “new” car.

Way back when I lived in England I owned a red 1969 Volvo 1800S, a rare B20B version (that is, a 2000cc, non-fuel-injected engine). Only 1693 were ever produced since Volvo brought out the 1800E pretty quickly with a fuel injection system added (E stands for einspritzung, the German for fuel injection, since the system used in the Volvos was produced by Bosch).

That car was nice-looking enough that it was the October picture in the Classic Cars calendar of 1991. It was a fun day I had with the photographer, driving all over Rochester in Kent, trying to get the perfect picture. The one published was taken outside Eastgate House in Rochester High Street, although we drove up to the castle and down to the Medway as well. I’ll post a photo of that calendar page later.

Once I moved to the States in 1993, I had to sell it. I couldn’t afford the shipping to Colorado and the car needed to be driven and looked after otherwise it would just have rotted away. So in 1995 I finally found a buyer and sold it and silently regretted it.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for a reasonably-priced red 1800S for the past year or so, one that has already been restored. I finally found one in California in July, a 1964 version with a B18B engine, and bought it one of the weeks I was in the DevExpress offices in Glendale. I had it shipped to Colorado (no way was I going to drive an unknown car 1000 miles home, especially one that had only been driven some 200 miles in the last 5 years). This was it on the Friday it was delivered:

The very next Monday I took it to Concours Cars in Old Colorado City for them to thoroughly check it over and retune it for the altitude. And it was a good job I did too: the heater core had a leak and the car was losing coolant like there was no tomorrow. (Boy was I glad I hadn’t decided to drive it back from California.)

In the end, they kept it for nearly a month fixing various systems and bits and pieces and replacing oil, fluids, belts, etc. I’m going to guess that whoever restored it ran out of money after doing the bodywork and rebuilding the engine since there were quite a few minor problems, apart from the heater core leak. Egregious examples: the headlights weren’t connected to the switch; the cable for the flap for the defroster was missing (besides which the flap itself was broken); there was no windscreen washer system at all apart from the nozzles. They also decided that the carburetor needed to be replaced (whatever fuel additive the previous owner had used had rotted the jets while it was in storage). There’s still a few little things to fix (which they’ll be doing over the winter), but at least they made sure the car was drivable and legal to drive.

Here’s the front, showing the cowhorn bumpers and the aluminum “egg-crate” grill (and the crappy “VOLVO” plate that is screwed on with some security screws that will have to be drilled out):

And here’s the rear, showing that I still need to register it in Colorado. The plate reads “64SAINT”, because it’s a 1964 car and The Saint, played by Roger Moore in the TV series, used to drive one in the 60s. I might go for the same plate here, if it’s available.

(You can see my set of pictures of the car on Flickr. I’ll keep updating it as I take more photos.)

Let me just say that the car is just awesome. It’s great fun to drive around town, even without power steering (the steering wheel is huge though and my upper body strength is improving!). Now I know how the automatic choke works I can even start it from cold without cranking and cranking the starter. It gets a bit noisy on the interstate (besides which I don’t really go above 60mph in it until the rebuilt engine has had a chance to settle down) and turning the air conditioning on just makes it noisier still. And the wheels are too gaudy for my taste (going to go for some Panasports later). But... overall, it’s just brilliant.

In September this year, we went, as is usual, to England to see my parents and have a holiday. Well, the weather this trip was pretty bad, rain, rain, and flooding, but on one day it was brilliant sunshine and so we walked up Kisdon Hill behind my parents' house.

On the way down, I tried out a little experiment in animation. I took a photograph every 3 paces as we came down. It made the downhill walk take much longer than the uphill walk, but, as I say, it was a day full of sunshine and it was good to be out and breathing the Yorkshire air.

A few (few!) minutes processing, and the result is here on YouTube.

Not bad, even though I say so myself. The village you see on the way down is Muker, North Yorkshire, and the door the video fetches up at is my parents' back door.

Notes for next time though: go for broke and take a photo every 2 paces and use a tripod (or, better, a monopod). The movie is a little jerky to say the least and I didn't keep the camera at the same angle all the time. I also realized when I came to process the photos (some 350 of them) that I'd shot them all in RAW format. A bit of a waste of memory, that, and processing.