Further Adventures With Cameras

I finally did get out and do some shooting today, though it didn't work out nearly the way I'd intended. I left my rokkaku at home, and of course the wind was strong enough to fly the Flowform 16, but not strong enough for it to fly my camera. Which turned out to be just as well since all my rig "improvements" made it so the shutter wouldn't fire. Ah well, that's progress for you.

Instead, I spent some time messing with CHDK scripts, and got my camera set up to do five image bracketing, saving in RAW format. Yes, I'm trying to do HDR from the air. Of course without the ability to trip the shutter remotely, it was all moot.

So I did some HDR shots from the ground. Being near the ocean, of course I wound up with surf in the pictures. This didn't work out so well. The surf was different in each of the shots, so it didn't really work out well. So I did some inland shots, which came out better. Boring, but better. Then it hit me: Infrared!

I popped on my R72 filter and did a five shot sequence of the surf. The long exposure times blurred the surf into oblivion, so the stack worked. Also, I found out that algae, just like tree leaves, comes out white in the near-IR. I should've known this, but it really didn't occur to me until I saw it. Coolio!



None of the pictures I took are worth posting, being experiments rather than really carefully crafted shots. My "tripod" was three chunks of coral rock set in a pile with my camera balanced on them. Not the best thing in the world for framing a shot. But it shows I can shoot RAW with my camera, I can automate an HDR stack using CHDK, and the idea works well enough that I can do it in the infrared as well. More testing required!

Now all I need to do is un-fix my rig to the point where the shutter fires again. Sheesh!

Tom