DIY: Quartz camera trigger timer for time lapse photography

Time lapse photography lets you capture and speed up the slow movement which you normally wouldn't notice.

Take movement of clouds for instance.
With your ordinary DSLR you can set a long exposure which would be sufficient to capture a short period of time just before sunrise or after the sunset.

Here's an animation I took a few weeks ago:



But what happens when you want to make a time lapse animation in mid-day?
— With plenty of light your camera will start taking multiple frames per second, which you don't need.

Obviously I didn't want to pay for an off the shelf product. I started a search for a timer. I think one of the solutions on the net was to use a graphic calculator and rig it up to your trigger.. too complex, and the calculator is way too big and expensive.

So what's the most common timer you can get your hands on?
— Quartz clocks, easy. They have a 1 second timer inside, which is wired to an electro-magnet, which moves the mechanism. They are cheap too, and you've probably got one.

To make it work, you need to extract the complete circuit board, including the battery connections and the electromagnetic coil (tube with a lot of wire wrapped around it).

Image from here http://www.mridout.force9.co.uk/ecw/quartzmodern.htm

Now think twice before doing the following, as it can potentially damage your camera:
You need to disconnect the coil and wire it up to your camera trigger. It might be a good idea to add a diode to the circuit to consume some of the power fed to the camera.

There are plenty of instructions how to make the camera trigger cables on the net.


When I was making mine, I added a power jack from an old bt modem, so I could connect things to the trigger cable. It worked neatly with the Quartz timer.



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DIY: Iphone headphones

Posessing an iPhone was a challenge because there's seldom any headphones available with the click-mic option. It was a couple of years ago when I asked my parents to get me a pair of vmoda vibe duo ear buds. Headphons were great, only they had a crappy cable which broke after a month of use. This happened when I was on my way to Heathrow — going on holiday.
Bad luck.

When I got back to UK, I've spent some time on the net and the vmoda's were getting the best ratings for the sound. I was disappointed about the £50 headphones giving in on me, so I've ripped the earbuds off their cables and soldered them onto the standard iphone cable. The buds still work now (two years on), I just buy a new set of standard headphones and replace the cable when it gets worn off.



And they sound great which is amazing for this type of headphones.

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15 amazing pictures from National Geographic

See them at National Geographic Vision of Earth or hit the jump.

Images from National Geographic

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DIY: Streamlined product photography with back-lit slope backdrop

[Updated] Now used to do 360 degree photography

Going away from the WWW in this post.

I will tell you how I streamlined product photography at my workplace, saved my employer some money and saved myself from getting repetitive strain injury of my right wrist.



You see, among other jobs I get to do at The Golden Boot is product photography for the online store. It comes down to taking hundreds of pictures when the stock for Spring—Summer or Autumn—Winter ranges comes in.

Before I had this great backdrop, I was spending 7 minutes on average to process a photograph (and there are usually two or three for each product.) This involved going around the outline of the item with a photoshop lasso to get rid of the shadow.
You really start to feel the way it affects your wrist if you do this for several days in a row.

Hit the jump for the full post
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Now, that's what I get after merely cropping and adjusting the contrast of the raw image taken using the new softbox:


The idea of lit-up background first struck me way back in 2008.



I shared the idea with my manager and he consented to build it.
He welded the frame and mounted the lights.

There are 16 lights and 4 switches. First two switch are for every odd light from 1 to 14, and the other 2 switches are for the lights at the top which can be switched on when photographing larger items. This lets me control the brightness of the background. (But I usually have it on full blast to keep my skin tanned up ;)



I wasn't sure about the white balance we'd get from the backdrop but I knew that I would have to colour balance the backdrop and the flash (Thanks Strobist!) so I bought a set of 16 colour filters (also called flash gels).
They are just cheap bits of coloured plastic.

We've now got a fully working professional backdrop parked at the back of the shop. It was cheap as we've had most of the stuff lying about, and it works a treat:



Note:
Balancing backlight colour with flash is easy — set your camera's white balance to flash, snap an underexposed shot of the backdrop to see what gel colour you need, fit one on to the flash and do a custom white balance on the background.

Another trick to get a good shot from a setup like this is to make sure that the actual backdrop is over-exposed. And you need another source of light to light up the product. You'll get a black shape without one.

Update:
The cost to build the frame was 15 pounds for the metal and we paid about 10 pounds for the plexiglass. The rest was built from the stuff we had.
Plexiglass was fixed to the frame with screws. The curve's large radius allowed it to be bent without any heat applied.

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Have you seen TED?

Ted is a wonderful portal where some very bright people share their ideas.

http://www.ted.com/

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Tip: Search based keyword tool from Google

Surely everyone knows about the google keyword tool, but have you seen the search based keyword tool?

It's great for keyword ideas, and the best thing is that the results are based on your existing website content.

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Getting your products on Google's product search

Right, so what do you do when your manager asks you to “get to the first page on Google”?

— Exactly, have a look whats up there already!

Hit the jump to read the full post
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As we are trying to flog some shoes here, we will search for a product name “Ecco Gift”.
You'll see some top ranking websites as well as Google's product results not far down the list:

And all you have to do to get up there is give Google a list of your products.

How cool is that? straight to the front page with no messing about at all! (there's a catch though, only top 3 Google shopping results show up. But there's much less competition to show up first in product search as for some strange reason many retailers are not submitting their products to the Google Base)

Of course there's no guarantee that it will work for every single thing you have on offer. But it's a good way to fill the gaps in the competition and it will do magic if you already own a well-off website.

Google base accepts manual entry as well as xml, which saves a lot of time when you have thousands of products to sell.

Get out there quick: base.google.com

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Selfish post about myself

Hi, I'm Ilya

I work part time for a shoe shop doing all of their digital media stuff (photography, graphic design, web development, SEO optimisation and marketing.)
I also do a bit of freelance web design on the side.

I am starting this blog to share some of the interesting things I get to do. Coming up in the near future: some ideas about selling stuff on google, streamlining product photography with a DIY lighting solution and perhaps some insights into website building.


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