What does it take you hours to do?

Have fun with this. I did. :)

Music by Joe Walsh from an episode of Duckman.

Night and Day

This is the first time-lapse movie (well, technically the second) I've made using the TC-80N3 remote timer and the adapter cable that attaches it to the Rebel XT. The first part was shot from about 9 last night till just after midnight. The second part was shot from 5:45 to 9:45 in the morning. In both cases, the images were taken at 30-second intervals, and in both cases, the camera continued shooting till it exhausted the battery.

I didn't think it would amount to much, but once it was assembled, I was actually struck by how much fun it is to watch. I hope you'll agree. :)

Adapting to the time(r)s...

When Canon designed a multi-use intervalometer for their DSLRs, they decided not to make it available to people in the prosumer end of the pool. They created the TC-80N3 for use with D-series cameras, but not the Rebel series. Users of the Rebel XT, possibly the most popular DSLR in the world (certainly the current champ on Flickr) had to make do with a simple shutter release remote. The timing was up to you and your wristwatch.

People who wanted to use the TC-80N3 with their 'lesser' Canon DSLRs were relegated to risky 'surgery' on the intervalometer, cutting off the connector and splicing on a stereo plug to make it compatible with the Rebel, XT, XTi (and thus, useless if one were ever to upgrade to a D-series camera).

Well, folks, thanks to Gerald Wechselberger of Austria, that's no longer true. Mr. Wechselberger offers a cable specifically designed to adapt the TC-80N3 to our cameras, and for a very reasonable €25, which included delivery to me here in Canada. It also greatly extends the reach of the cable, which is less than a yard on the TC-80N3 itself.

My TC-80N3 intervalometer arrived last Thursday. Yesterday, the Rebel-series adapter arrived from Austria. I plugged the intervalometer into the cable and the cable into the XT, and the TC-80N3 took over the XT just fine. I've been running experiments to see how long the battery in the XT will last, taking an exposure every 30 seconds for hours on end. I'm really looking forward to using it this spring and summer for astrophotography and time-lapse movie-making. So thanks to Gerald Wechselberger! He's made it possible for the Rebel-series crowd!

Unsquare Toronto

One thing leads to another

For a couple of months now I've gotten into time-lapse photography... taking a series of still images a second or so apart and then stringing them into a movie. Alternately, filming something with my G9's time-lapse movie facility. That works well enough, but my preferred method is to take a series of stills with the Rebel XT.

I bought the Rebel XT about two and a half years ago, not to long after I started this blog. It's never really been my "main" camera, because it's impractical to carry around. But on the other hand, it is a DSLR, and can manage a lot of things the PowerShots I've been using since I got the G1 in early 2006 really can't quite. One of those is to take a series of precisely-timed, interval-driven series of photos over a period of time.

Canon makes an intervalometer — a remote timer controller — for its higher-end EOS DSLRs. This, unfortunately, leaves the Rebel, the XT, and the XTi in the dust. However, a guy in Austria actually makes and sells an adapter cable that will allow you to plug the TC-80N3 into the plug for the RS-60E3 remote shutter release. When it arrives, this will enable me to shoot time-lapse in a manner I haven't be able to so far. Up till now, it's involved setting up the XT, plugging in the RS-60E3, and then letting the camera shoot exposures basically as fast as it can. There's no subtlety to it; you get it as fast as the camera can go, and that's that. With the TC, which arrived yesterday (the cable should be here sometime next week), I'd be able to go out to the light sanctuaries this summer, set up the camera, point it at the sky and set it to ISO 200 and F/5.6 and have the intervalometer take 15-second exposures (four a minute) for, say, six hours. Come home, throw the still images in sequence into the movie software, and voila... a movie of the sky slowly rotating. I know it's been done a million times, but the point is, not by me. Not yet.

I had some interesting trouble with the guys in London (London, Ontario, not England) trying to order it. For some reason I can't fathom, they pretty much insisted that I call up my card issuer and inform them of the delivery address I'd given them. To me, this was utterly absurd. Putting aside the point that my credit card isn't actually a credit card – it's a pay-positive card (in other words, the only money on it is money I've already earned and put on it) that facilitates use of the MasterCard system – what possible business is it of the card issuer where I have a purchase delivered? What, every time I chose to send something to an address other than my billing address, I'm supposed to phone up the card issuer and register the delivery address? I don't think so. I politely but firmly informed them that I had never been asked to do so by any retailer in the nearly 20 years I've held credit cards, and I had no intention of starting; that if the card number, expiry date, billing address, and shipping destination didn't suffice for them to close the deal, I would simply buy it downtown. The only reason I was working with them in the first place was they had the best price on the web ($30 cheaper than the best quote I got here in Toronto). Of course, there was also $15 in shipping that I wouldn't have buying it in town, so really I was only saving about the cost of a modest lunch ordering from them. It wasn't worth it if they were going to start making life hard for me... not for fifteen bucks. Fortunately, the grudgingly $aw the light and li$tened to rea$on and $hipped the thing a couple of days ago, and it arrived yesterday. So I now have the camera, the timer, and no means yet to successfully mate them. Ah, but the aphrodisiac is on its way from Europe, even now. :)

Not quite soon enough, though. I've been working for a month now on a new project; time-lapse of night scenes in the city. It's going well, but I need a sunset (and possibly a moonrise) to complete the project. A lot of calculation and waiting for a sunny weekend has given me this Saturday downtown to catch the sun ducking into the buildings of the downtown core, from the bridge that carries Richmond and Adelaide Streets over the DVP. It'll be cold, but hopefully not a lonely vigil. P-Doug has kindly agreed to aid me, and aside from the company, he's pretty much indispensable. He has a timer that will chime every minute, telling me when to open the shutter. I think we need to be set up by about 5 PM, as sunset is at 5:48, but it'll be settling into the buildings slightly earlier than that, I think. Hopefully I'll get some good results. We'll soon see.

HDR from a single RAW

Just lately I've discovered the joys of working with RAW image format in a big way. Previously, I didn't have much use for it, but Photomatix has come out with a new version that takes a RAW image, processes it itself, and creates what they call a "pseudo" HDR (high dynamic range, if you're new to this) image from the information in the RAW. (Again, if you're new to this, RAW is the generic term for any file generated by a digital camera that simply captures what the sensor received without processing it.)

I got into HDR stuff about two years back. Basically, it requires you take an AEB spread of at least three images; one underexposed, one overexposed, and one balanced. The detail in the highlights is in the underexposed, and the detail in the shadows is in the overexposed shot. Combine the three and you can an image with startling clarity. The trick is making sure the camera doesn't move during the three (or more) exposures.

One way around that is to shoot RAW. A RAW image typically has 12 to 14 bits of information per pixel, rather than just 8 for a single JPG image. There's also the added advantage that, since it's a single exposure, there's no need to worry about anything moving from shot to shot, or the camera tilting slightly (a tripod can address the latter only).

I haven't worked a lot with RAW for two reasons. Mostly, I couldn't think of a good application for it that justified the huge footprint of the file (usually twice or more the size of a JPG). But also because the vast majority of the photographic work I've done in the past two years was using my S80, and for reasons known to them alone, Canon dropped the RAW format from the PowerShot S line with that model (my S70 shoots RAW). For big treks I'd often bring my Rebel XT, and it, of course, shoots RAW (so it was the source of most of the material I've been experimenting with the past few days). But, again, I rarely shot RAW because there was little reason to... it just meant ages of processing just to see the image. But, now I'm carrying around a G9 that does shoot RAW, and Photomatix gives me a reason to, so I'm considering making RAW my default format rather than JPG.

When I started in HDR, the idea seemed to be to make something as garish and eye-catching as possible. But I can see now that the real treasure in the process is actually making something that's hyper-real, rather than something from a acid trip. Carefully done, an HDR image can look like something from real life, but at a glance can show you the details in highlights and shadows that you normally cannot see all at once. Your eyes would have to adjust to view either one, or the other. And so while the scene looks real, there's a slight, exhilarating otherworldliness to them in the, well, range of what you can see all at one time. Now to me, there's a real value in that, which is why I'm thinking of taking all my shots this way and processing the really interesting ones with Photomatix to show people the entirety of what was really there.

A few purists I've read have said you can't get a good HDR image out of a RAW. I beg to differ. I know from my own experience it doesn't work every time, but then again, neither does a three-image AEB spread either. In both cases, you seem to get the best results when there's a lot of light in the scene, or at the very least, a lot of contrast. But you can be the judge for yourself. The following are HDR images I've recently teased out of single RAW exposures.

Adventures with a new camera

Thought I'd report on how it's going with the Rebel XT, particularly since James left a comment to the effect that he was interested, since he is considering getting a new camera himself.


First portrait victim: Bonnie.

This is one of my cats, Bonnie, a sweet tortie. She patiently endured about a half-dozen camera flashes in order for me to secure a shot I liked.



Second victim: Max.

Max, my other cat. This shot was taken with the Tamron 70-300mm telephoto/macro lens that came in the camera bundle deal. It was set on macro, obviously.



Product placement?

A no-name brand of diet cola, if you're curious. I've wanted to take shots like this for years. Across the span of just a couple of inches, the image is out of focus, comes into focus, and goes out of focus again. Look at the detail... you can see the etching of the brushed aluminum. This shot was also taken with the Tamron lens, at a distance of about three feet from the can.



Tribute to Jody.

Jody is a net friend I had for ten years, first in Albuquerque and later in Dallas. He died fourteen months ago today. We never met face to face, but I talked to him just about every day, and he came to be something like a brother to me. Unfortunately for so many people, a rare form of cancer came into his life a few years ago, and finally ended it. The little cedar chest holds a small share of his ashes, given to me by his roommates when I went to Dallas for his memorial. The cheetah figure is meant to be iconic of him, and was sent to me by a young woman he went to college with. The portrait behind is, as you might guess, a picture of Jody himself in happier times.



Big Dipper, little plane, dark field.

Friday night I decided to test the camera's nighttime abilities. Even with my still very limited knowledge, I got some shots I was happy with. I went out to the flood plain where Old Cummer bridge is (if you remember it from an earlier posting; the bridge is about 30 yards away, just off to the right in this shot). This picture was taken at a crook in the East Don River, which is just behind me, as is the beaver dam that diverts its course. This view faces north, and was taken from a tripod; a 17-second exposure at f3.5/ISO 1600. The one thing I bought with the camera that wasn't bundled with it was a $29 infrared remote. With the camera set on "bulb", one click on the remote would open the shutter, and the next would close it again. What I was trying to do was see if I could actually photograph the constellations, down in valley where the light pollution is minimal. What you see here is the Big Dipper — so happily, the answer is yes, it can photograph the skies. The streak near the bottom is a plane, travelling right to left, for the 17-second duration of the shot (basically, I closed the shutter when it reached the tree).

Today, I went out with my friends P-Doug and G to the east end of the GTA, partly to continue putting the camera through its paces. In Uxbridge, there's a gorgeous mausoleum build by, and for, Thomas Foster, one-time federal MP and Mayor of Toronto in the 1920s. It resembles the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.



Approaching the Thomas Foster Mausoleum.

Here is G approaching the entrance to the mausoleum.



Beneath the entrance.

An up-shot from the lower right. I decided to shoot this in black and white, red filter, to make it a little moodier and more dramatic.



Floor detail of the mausoleum.

This is directly under the dome. I was invited by the curators to lie down on this spot to photograph the dome... which I did.



The dome of the mausoleum.

...And this is the result. I couldn't get all this in one shot; this is actually two photographs, mated in Photoshop. The colour quality and lighting were so consistent between them that this took only a couple of minutes to stitch.

If you can't read the gold lettering, it says, "Take this my body for it is done and I have gained a new life glorious and eternal."



Wall detail.

The tile work in the mausoleum is truly beautiful; intricate and a real credit to whomever the artists were who inlaid it.



The pretentious NYC condos at Bayview and Sheppard.

And, just as a change of pace to wrap things up, here are the NYC condos to be seen as one drives along the 401 between Bayview Avenue and Leslie Street. This shot was taken at a mall exit on Sheppard Avenue, just east of Bayview, and faces south. The buildings occupy the narrow strip between Sheppard and the 401.

Rex mortuus est, vivat rex!

For years and years now I've been pining for the day we'd finally have affordable digital single-lens reflex cameras... not these little point and shoot toys that are more often used these days by people to make little AVIs of their grandchild singing the alphabet or the dog chasing a stick. Years ago I actually had a decent SLR camera, but that was the days of film. That meant paying to buy the film. Paying to develop the film. Paying to print the shots. And never knowing if they were any good at all till all this expensive nonsense was out of the way.

When digital cameras started coming out in the mid-90s, I was a quick adopter. I got a Kodak DC25 in February of 1997. It was just this tiny little thing; had a built-in flash, an LCD review, and held 17 or so 320x240 shots of low quality. But it was digital! No more buying film or getting it developed! I was hooked.

In fairly short order I blew through Kodak cameras (and money), moving on to the DC40 (held 24 good shots), the DC50 (had a zoom and you could plug in extra memory), and finally, about four years ago, the DC4800 I've been using ever since.


The outgoing king, the Kodak DC4800. Photographed using the Canon 350D.

The DC4800's a good camera. With a 256MB card in it, it produced about 260 decent photos at 3.1 megapixel size. It's been a superlative camera for capturing casual shots of places I've been. But I want to start experimenting and taking some shots that are outside the ordinary and the everyday, like the ones you'll see on daily dose of imagery. And so, today, I acquired the Canon 350D Rebel XT, the camera that takes the shots on that site. I don't mean to suggest I have that photographer's eye, and I certainly don't have his experience, but now I mean to start learning. From here on in, the shots you see here will be taken with the Rebel XT.

For you sentimentalists, fear not. The DC4800 is going to a good home; that of my friend P-Doug, who worked as a photographer and developer for 25 years before becoming an archivist; in exchange for a 1G CF card for the Rebel XT.


The incoming king, the Canon 350D Rebel XT. Photographed using the Kodak DC4800.