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Canon + iOS tethering solutions

There’s magic that happens inside the camera. Yes, magic. Most cameras expose the controls to that magic via some knobs and buttons and a small LCD screen. The knobs and other physical controls we like, but the screen pales in comparison to those on our iPhones. And that’s the thing, the hundreds of apps on […] » about 300 words

Clarity from a distance

The sky looks big from earth, but it’s rather different the other way around. I’m not saying it’s not quite an experience, but inspecting the metadata on this photo of New York and surroundings taken on Christmas day, 2000, during the first International Space Station mission surprised me. To wit: it’s only a 180mm lens. […] » about 300 words

Aww, I got thanked!

I recently backed the Syrp Genie, one of a handful of recent motion control timelapse projects on Kickstarter. It’s well past its expected ship date, but they done a good job of keeping backers updated on progress and just today they shared photos of the box that will soon be on it’s way to me. […] » about 100 words

Action Camera Market Not Yet Saturated, According To Sony

I wondered if the GoPro-style action camera market had already become saturated back in January, now I’ve learned that Sony apparently doesn’t think so. At least one imagines that’s the conclusion they came to before deciding to join the competition with a camera of their own. They call it the Action Cam, and it clearly takes its design cues from Contour.

What does Sony offer to stand apart from the established players? 120 frames per second at 720p, WiFi, and SteadyShot is what they’d say, though SteadyShot takes the angle of view from 170° down to 120°. It doesn’t do meaningful still photos or timelapse.

It releases on September 24 for $270 if you’re still interested.

USB Camera Control

Problem The Canon EOS M doesn’t include a remote shutter release cable port, and the on-camera controls don’t expose features such as bulb-mode exposures. Further, simple remote shutter release doesn’t support the sophisticated camera control necessary to do timelapses with complex exposures. What kind of complex exposures? Imagine a timelapse going from day to night. During daylight […] » about 700 words

GoPro HD Hero 2 Lens Correction

GoPro’s HD Hero 2 action camera is everywhere, so perhaps we’ll all be used to the fisheye’d images it produces soon. On the other hand, there are software solutions to rectify the image to rectilinear. Vimeo user Peter iNova has a few videos demonstrating his Photoshop action sets to straighten out an HD Hero’s output.

A person could probably significantly improve performance by giving up on Photoshop and building a video filter based on the Panotools image manipulation library.

My real interest is in correcting still photos, so some of the Panotools derivatives can help me out of the box. LensFix is a classic, but the developer has closed up shop for the time being. A little more searching led me to PTLens. Twenty five dollars buys the plugin, and a few moments with each photo will get rid of the fisheye effect.

The GoPro cameras aren’t among the list of supported cameras, but that looks like it can be resolved.

Bendy horizons are interesting a few times, but I hope soon I’ll be able to straighten them out. And, given that some cameras do this in firmware, perhaps the next GoPro camera will have the feature built-in.

parallel-flickr Backs Up Your Flickr Library

parallel-flickr: a tool for backing up your Flickr photos and generating a database backed website that honours the viewing permissions you’ve chosen on Flickr. More details from the website: It downloads and stores your original photos and their “640x” versions. Currently photos are stored locally but there’s a plan to add support for S3. For […] » about 200 words

The War On Cameras

WNYC’s On The Media did a nice piece on it back in September (MP3 download): judging from the arrests and harassment, photographers are part of a terrorist plot. Or something. The CopBlock (tagline: “badges don’t grant extra rights”) map of actions taken against photographers is littered with activity. » about 100 words

Which Steady Cam Is Best For A GoPro HD Hero2?

I have a new GoPro HD Hero2, one of the best new video cameras available (if what you like in a video camera is a compact, wide-angle, and waterproof), and I’m looking for a way to steady it for handheld shots. The Steadicam Smoothee is built for iPhones. Their demo video and this comparison of […] » about 400 words

Call it Rolling Shutter or Focal Plane Shutter, It Looks Weird…Cool

I’ve been both frustrated by and in love with focal plane shutter distortion (Wikipedia calls it rolling shutter) for a while, now I’ve discovered there’s a group for it. One of the photos I pointed to in my earlier post was of a low-flying helicopter (bottom), a couple other photographers have captured the effect the […] » about 100 words

Watching Valentine’s Rose Fade

The Georgia O’Keefe view, above, or the still life view, below: This isn’t so much about Valentine’s Day as it is about finally getting setup to do time lapse video like this. More to come at maisonbisson.com/timelapse. » about 100 words

Casey Bisson