erstaunlich, was alles in einen citroen saxo reinpasst…
sent from my iPhone, please excuse my brevity and the potential typos.
timelapse-movie with a nikon d80
lately, there has been quite a hype around timelapse-movies (one fabulous example by the amazing keith loutit: Metal Heart ), so i wanted to jump the bandwagon: as there is no addon firmware for my camera as there is for certain canon models i’m confined either using an intervalometer or an external software to trigger the time-lapse process. luckily for me there exists an donation-ware called sofortbild.app which allows for tethered shooting with os x.
sofortbild.app enables you to remotely control your cameras setting like exposure and aperture, perform bracketing and inteval-timed shots. and it looks quite gorgeous:
so, to generate a time-lapse movie you need:
- a subject, which either moves quickly or very slow (my little “garden” being a very good example)
- a nikon DSLR, sofortbild.app and a mac or some other way of getting a lot of shots out of your camera
- some way of generating a movie, either with quicktime pro, imovie or the free and platform-independent imageJ
- a bit of time (starting it in the morning and then going for a dive in the thunersee is perfect for this :) )
i’ve set up sofortbild.app to take a picture of my garden with an interval of 1 minute and let it run from 10:49 until 16:21, giving me 333 images (i’m a sucker for nice numbers…), imported the images in quicktime pro with a rate of 10 pictures per second resulting in the short movie below
i’m amazed on how much my chives move during approximately 6 hours, even inside the room (which was necessary, since we’ve got scaffolding around our house which is being renovated). oh and yes, they look bad, but it’s because they have to live inside for the moment…
Baldachin by Night II
during the past few weeks i’ve been thinking about the panorama i’ve shot of the baldachin near the railway-station here in bern. i’ve thought it would be very nice to have a nightly version of the same panorama. so, yesterday evening i again spent some time on the bubenbergplatz and shot quite a bunch of images. i’ve had two lenses with me, the newly aquired 16mm zenitar fisheye which makes shooting panoramas a breeze, since the FOV is so big, but is actually quite a hassle to setup, since it’s a fully manual lens, so more suited for this task than for snapshots. in addition to the zenitar i’ve had my trusty 38-80mm zoom lens
the first results from my mini-photo-safari can be seen in this set here on flickr. most of the images are shot with the zenitar, but the important one is shown here below:
the image is humongous (600 kB), so you need to wait a little bit until it loads. to close the pop-up, scroll toward the far right!
again, it’s a panorama, this time shot and composed from 123 images in total (really!). all the images have been taken yesterday evening from 21:35 until 21:45, so if the setup is good, you can shoot a panorama like that in 10 minutes, including waiting time until all the cars, busses and trams are where you want them…
the panorama is – again, as the one shot about three months ago in the afternoon – composed from three exposures for each position, hence i’ve covered the field of view with 41 images and fused the images down to one enhanced exposure with enfuse built into hugin.
i really need to get a nice very wide angle lens, since shooting panoramas with the zenitar is really a breeze, apart from the manual setup. this panorama has been composed from only three images and looks already quite impressive. really impressive – in my opinion anyways – is that shooting a full 360° panorama of the bubenbergplatz only requires 10 images and about one and a half minute and can be seen below (444 kB):
the full 360°-panorama is of course much nicer in the fully interactive view, provided here.
Baldachin by Night
das sieht doch schon mal nicht allzuschlecht aus. der rest der abendlichen kurz-photo-safari folgt nach der bearbeitung…
us-amerikanischer unsinn: folge 754
rolltreppen im zoo. ’nuff said!
us-amerikanische coolness: folge 23
die rockabilly-band, die während dem konzert rausgeht, draussen weiterspielt und gemütlich eine raucht, weil drinnen niemand rauchen darf. mir tat der drummer leid, der musste nämlich drinnen weiterspielen.
us-amerikanischer unsinn: folge 631
cola light mit zusätzlichen vitaminen & mineralien. schmeckt wie cola light ohne zusätze.
trying not to get lost
at the san diego conference center
saletti!
also, ich verabschiede mich mal, ich bin bis zum 25. mai in den usa, präsentiere am ATS-meeting meine arbeit der letzten monate und schaue, dass ich keine influenza a(h1n1) nach hause bringe.
häbets guet und bis gli. falls online-mässig etwas geht, dann wohl am ehesten bei der open-source-variante von twitter, hier.
beatenbucht
letzten sonntag war ich mal wieder im wasser, diesmal (wie gesagt) etwas tiefer, in der beatenbucht an der steilwand.
sigi hat seine sichtweise schon gezeigt, meine ansicht des letzten tauchgangs findet ihr unten:
getting ready for ATS2009
idplotter.unibe.ch full speed ahead!
kurzkritik aktuelles nzz-folio
beim schnellen drüberschauen muss ich sagen, dass ich mich wie immer aufs lesen des aktuellen nzz-folios freue, aber das titelbild (links), das erinnert mich schon ein bisschen zu fest an den toon “A Walk In The Woods” (rechts) von weebl…
blgmndybrn 05/09
- 18:05: keiner im Christoffel, also Geld holen gegangen.
- 18:09: keiner im Christoffel, also kurz im Migros nebendran einkaufen gegangen.
- 18:17: keiner im Christoffel, also im Thalia den PSR-505 ausprobieren gegangen: Fazit, cooles Teil, aber doch etwas teuer, hoffentlich wird der txtr reader billiger.
- 18:25: keiner im Christoffel, also heim gegangen.
- 18:27: Herr Studer über den Bahnhofplatz radeln sehen, nachgerufen, er hat mich nicht gehört, also weiter heim gegangen.
- 18:31: Gestaunt, dass die Bauarbeiter in einem Tag 3 Küchen und 3 Badezimmer aus zu renovierenden Wohnungen entfernen können (bei uns im Haus wird während der nächsten zwei Monate die Hälfte der Wohnungen, Fenster und Fassade renoviert).
- 18:37: gebloggt.
Heute mal etwas tiefer
In der Bucht neben der Beatenbucht: 32.2 m, 37 min, 7 Grad
sent from my iPhone, please excuse my brevity and the potential typos.
iTunes update-check #fail
is this a known problem for other iphone-owning readers of my blog?
iTunes tells me that there are updates for iPhone applications, I click on the “check for updates”-button and iTunes tells me – sometimes twice – that updates for my programs are available. i thus have to click multiple times to see the updates of which I already know that they’re available… quite annoying, don’t you think? does one of my readers have the same problem and even knows a resolution? I’d like to hear your tips.
a short screencast describing the problem can be seen below:
oh, and this post is also a test of jing :)
danny macaskill, inspiration [video] [with map]
einer um gut in den tag zu starten: der stunt bei ca. 3:15 ist unglaublich!
[via milano fixed]
da fühle ich mich mit meinen knapp 20 km ein bisschen hoch- und runterfahren am feierabend grad langweilig, auch wenn ich’s laut gps-tracker auf 81 km/h höchstgeschwindigkeit gebracht habe. der track ist unten zu sehen, das geschwindigkeits-profil ganz unten.
nachtrag zum gp I: finisherclip [video]
genau wie christian wollte ich auch noch meinen finisher-clip zum besten geben. ungefähr in der mitte des clips, im blauen tshirt, kurz vor demjnigen im schwarz-weissen, der nach zieldurchlauf die arme hochreisst. im ziel weniger sportlich unterwegs als christian, aber trotzdem glücklich :)
falls der clip oben nicht sichtbar ist, kann mensch auch hier klicken, ums anzuschauen (übrigens: schöne URLs, bravo!)
bravo habi, dan und christian!
Ich nehm’ mir vor, nächstes Jahr mehr als vier Mal zu joggen vor dem
Grand Prix; nicht damit ich schneller bin, sondern damit ich weniger
leide…
Ach und ja; einem Freund helfen zu zügeln am morgen war wohl auch
nicht die ideale Vorbereitung.
panoramas from (low quality) movies [update]
whenever i’m spending a day outdoor, i love to take pictures, many of them turn out to be panoramas.
sometimes i leave my camera at home and only have my mobile phone with me. shoothing panoramas with the iphone is possible with panolab [link opens itunes], but very cumbersome. and i try to keep the annoyance of nina as low as possible while stopping on the slopes, so fiddling with my phone for longer than a minute or two is not an option.
recently i was thinking about a quick-and-dirty way of creating panorams with the iphone: wouldn’t it be possible to extract the images of a movie shot while panning the scenery and stitch those together to generate a panorama? today was the perfect way to test this out, on the slopes of the wonderful stockhorn.
the whole process is fairly easy, you only need
- an iphone, jailbroken (or any other movie source :) ) with cycoder installed
- cyberduck or winscp, depending on your platform
- imageJ and
- hugin
all these – very fine – pieces of software are freely available, most of them even free as in beer and as in speech.
step 1:
shoot a movie.
below are the movies i’ve used for this tutorial. both are made with the excellent cycoder.app, only for jailbroken iphones. use any other movie if you don’t have an iphone :) the movies are 384×288 pixels in size, as shown below, just press the play-button.
step 2:
get the movies off your iphone.
cyberduck and SFTP are my weapons of choice, YMMV, but there are tons of tutorials on the web, here’s one for the mac and here’s one for windows.
now you should have some movies on your hard-disk. cycoder has the nice feature to produce quicktime-compatible .mov-files, if you don’t have one of those handy, again, YMMV. (use the excellent handbrake to convert to and fro). quicktime is nice for the next step.
step 3:
import the movies into imageJ.
if you’re on a mac, this is just simple drag-and-drop, on windows you might be quicker altogether if you convert your movies to .avi-files, since installing quicktime for java can be a bit of a hassle, but can be done.
this opens your quicktime movie as a stack of images you can then scroll through. this image-stack can then easily be exported as an image-sequence using “File > Save as > Image Sequence…”. rotate the images if you’ve been dumb enough to hold the iphone wrong :)
then you’ll have a bunch of single images on your harddisk. if you’ve panned quite slowly like i have done, you’re probably gonna have much too many images (167 for the first and 139 for the second movie) to easily stich a panorama. for these movies, i’ve removed some images from the stack using the slice remover plugin. remove slices that are unnecessary like the ones at the beginning and the end, where your glove covers the lens. now having 20 and 32 images from both movies, proceed to the next step.
step 4:
import the images from the step above into hugin, align and stitch.
yes, that’s it, it’s really that easy. for the movies shown above i’ve also deleted some bad control points and stitched the panoramas normally and enfused, but this is entirely optional.the end-result looks like the images below. click them to see them bigger.
i know that both panoramas are not perfect. both are quite small, especially the second one has some artifacts and both have varying exposure. but keep in mind that i’ve only bothered nina for 29 seconds, the total time of both movies. not too shabby!
update:
arru from sweden left a comment about extracting the frames of videos using VLC, which is great, because it plays pretty much any movie-format.
since i couldn’t find it, i asked him to outline it for me via email. he agreed that i share his howto, which you can find below:
Extract frames in VLC:
- Open VLC preferences, select “all” (as opposed to “basic”)
- Go to Video->Output modules
- Select ‘Image video output’ (this must be reverted to ‘standard’ when you’re done, to use VLC as a normal video player again)
- Flip down the subgroup next to Output modules and select ‘Image file’
- Choose ‘PNG’ as format (JPEG works too, but there will be some unnecessary quality loss)
- Set ‘recording ratio’ to 10 (determines the number of video frames skipped between images – may need to experiment with this value if images don’t overlap correctly)
- Press ‘save’ to exit VLC preferences
- Open and play the video in question as you normally would (notice: there will be no picture – sound however, if applicable, and the VLC controls will move to show you the progress of the conversion)
- Images are saved to the root of the main HDD on Mac OS X ( / ), on Windows I can only assume it will be C:
- Don’t forget to reset step 2 to ‘Standard’ when you’re done
- Throw images into Hugin and run one of the autopano scripts, and so forth
Thanks for that info, Arru!
der wohl letzte skitag der [with map]
bei den temperaturen heute war auch auf dem stockhorn nicht mehr allzuguter schnee, nichtsdestotrotz war’s ein wunderbarer tag und ein gelungener abschluss der ski-saison (sehr wahrscheinlich)