Photography - Improvised macro lens mould study

I got another lens from a junk bin in a camera store.

This one is a canon f 1.4, 35-80mm zoom.

It has an auto focus motor that makes a sound a bit like you might hear if you put a blender in a blender, but the auto focus still works.

The bits that don't work so well, are the lenses.

The problem is mould inside the lens.

Not uprising for a 500 Yen lens sitting in the junk bin of a camera store in the country that invented humidity.


That's a ridiculously close up shot of the mould.

Ridiculously close up.





I don't have any way of doing macro shots with my new camera, so I had to improvise.

I took the shot of the mould with this home made bit of kit.

The blue lens cloth is there to keep the light out of the improvised macro lens, because the small length of toilet roll acting as an extension tube  isn't light tight.

The lens attached (that's a generous description) to the camera is actually on backwards, and is resting against the other end of the toilet roll tube.

The lens resting on the red kitchen scrubber is the new one with the mould garden inside.



The torch is a torch.

The torch is there because the camera's lens has the aperture set as small as it will go (f36) to try to get at least some of the mould in focus.

I didn't really achieve that.

The exposures were around 30 seconds long (many minutes without the torch), and other people were working in the house at the time. My desk is a wobbly kitchen table top heavy with old CRT computer monitors, and all the other junk I like to keep at hand. As as a result it amplifies any movement from people, traffic, and the fridge and freezer compressors.

If you put a glass of water on a desk like mine and look at the reflection, you will see the reflected image dance all over the place. Normally it isn't a problem, because the camera and lens would both move at the same time, but with this contraption, there was nothing of substance connecting the lens and the camera.

Tricky.

Anyway...

The lens has mould in it.

The image on the left was taken with the canon 18-55mm lens that came with the camera.

The image on the right is taken with the mouldy 35-80mm lens.

The camera was set to the same settings for both shots.



Mould is not a friend of the lens.

The point of all this, is to point out that I wont be taking an angle grinder to my lens in some future post  without reason.

Actually I'll try to open it up and clean it, but there is a fair chance it's bits of glass are coated in a very delicate plastic coating, called coating. If that's the case the mould may have become a permanent fixture by etching it's way into the coated bits.

The mould appears to be on only one element, so I might be able to salvage some other bits and make a proper, mould-free macro lens.



120 Things in 20 years warns that when I say "proper" I mean the improvised macro lens might employ slightly fewer toilet paper tubes, and where they are unavoidable, they might be made a bit less wobbly and light leaky.

Photography - New (to me) Canon EOS 20D camera

My new camera is a lot like my old camera in so far as they both take pictures, and they are both 8 megapixel cameras.

But after that they diverge a bit.

The Sanyo Xacti that I've been using for the last 1300 photos I've taken was gifted at me by someone (Thanks anonymous company) when I really needed a replacement because all the point and shoot digital cameras I've bought to make this blog (I think it's 3 now) fall over just after 5000 happy snaps.

5000 seems like a lot when I put it in print, but in terms of time, that equates to less than a year per camera.  Sure they cost less than AU$100, but I still want more than a year out of anything I buy.

This one that I've been using is still going strong, and does a pretty good job of it I suppose, but I found the interface very heavy going.

It has quite a few options and features, but all of them have to be accessed via a clunky multi-level menu system. That means that every time you want to do anything other than what it's set to do now, you have to explore a stack of menus to finally find what you need, and by the time you've found it, the ladybird has finished eating it's aphid, and flown away.

My new camera on the other hand is a zillion times better to work with. I've only had it for around 10 hours, but it already feels comfortable.

It's taken around 1200 pictures so far in it's life.

I have very greasy fingers.

I'm eating zucchini and haloumi fritters.

Delicious.


The new camera is a Canon 20D. It was originally sold for around AU$1500 (Australian dollar) in 2004, and was described as a "semi-professional" or "prosumer" camera at the time, which of course means substantially more than other imaginary words and their associated imaginary metrics.

But on the whole, the camera rocks.

That's my official rating out of 5.

It has a 4 GB CF memory card, which is the size of a bulky circa 2012 64GB mp3 player, and that cost around the same as a bulky circa 2012 64GB mp3 player. It takes a while to transfer photos, but it has very nice functionality, and best of all has an interface that works.

It also comes with some nice lumps of glass in the lens. It seems to be the lens that lets down lots of little point and shoot cameras. The quality of the photo's taken by my new 8 megapixel camera is a lot better than those I've taken with an 8 megapixel point and shoot style camera.

The second lens feels a bit like it might blow away, but at $10 it's a very nice thing to have around.

The camera came with a Canon 18-55mm f3.5 image lens, with image stabalizer. I've just discovered I love image stabalizing. Image stabalizing allows you to be a bit shakey, and have the lens do some stuff to fix it.

As I understand it, there are exactly two ways to do image stabilizing.

• 1. Project an image onto the censor, so that the image is a little larger than the censor, and the image has some extra image in the margins. Then have the camera track your shakey projection, and then use magic or software or something to knit together a nice crisp image.

• 2. Track some points on the image, and move the lens around a bit so that any given point on the censor always sees the same bit of the image, or move the censor to achieve the same thing.

• 3. Use gyroscopes mounted on at least two axes to resist the movement of the entire camera. Things spinning around like to keep doing it. If you take the tire off your bike (stop first) and hold the axle while someone else spins it as fast as they can, it becomes difficult to change the angle it's on. This is why a spinning top (do they still have those?) stays upright, and is simply due to the universe being an amazing place.

Amazing!

The camera shows its age through it's 8 megapixelness, as at the time of writing, that's about 16 megapixels short of where it should be.

I bought it from a second hand camera store in Japan for $150 with the Canon 18-55mm zoom, and I got the second lens, a Tamron 100-300 zoom, for $10 from the bargain bin.

Thanks Tom.

Tom's a friend of mine.

He's really good at buying way too much camera gear from junk bins. His hobby includes buying those instamatic film cameras that were big in the 70s. He likes to buy them when they have rolls of film still in them so he can process the film. In some subtle way, that's slightly different from buying some old photos.

Which is nice.

For him.

He's kind of a time traveller, but he only gets to look, and doesn't get to choose what he looks at.

Mostly he gets to look at darkness.

Sometimes darkness, but with slightly mouldy edges.

Luckily, I don't suffer from collecting things other than my collection of odd people I know.

Tom's one of my favourites.

Thanks Tom.




120 Things in 20 years - One of the best parts about getting my new, second hand Canon 20D camera, was getting to look at the Japanese supermarket junkmail it was packed in. It's been 20 years since I was in Japan, and the junkmail paper is now of even better quality.

Photography - Camera hacking

I've bought a new camera!

But more importantly for right now, my old camera didn't focus any more, so I thought I might pull it to bits to see if I could fix it.

A camera hack if you like.

Well it's hacked now.

But in the process of attempting to fix it, I thought it might be grit or something stuck in the focus gears. I figured I might be able to override the emergency shutdown on lens fail, and just use brute force to get past the grit.

But before pulling it apart I thought I'd look for a software hack to manually focus the thing. It's a Canon Powershot A490 point and shoot (or at least it was), so it doesnt normally have manual focus.

I found much more than a focus hack, but also much less.

Much less in that I still couldn't do manual focus, but so very much more in that I found CHDK - Canon Hack Development Kit.

CHDK is amazing. It's a kit full of files that you install onto your SD memory card, put it into your camera, then use the update firmware option (only seen on my camera when the CHDK is on the card) of your camera to install all the new functionality. It does things like...

• motion detection
• increment focus to automate focus/photo stacking as mentioned in the previous post
• depth of field calculator
• exposures from 2048s to 1/60,000s with flash sync
• change the layout and visibility of you on screen display info
• etc etc etc (so much more)

Look here to see a slightly bigger list, but still not all of it.

And here for the manual which covers more.

But even more can be found on the forum in the form of scripts that can be loaded into your camera. There are scripts that do motion detection fast enough to catch lightning strikes. (less than 60ms I think it was - dont quote me)

So in spite of just buying a new camera, I'm off to see if the $20 camera I saw in the electronics shops bargain bin is a cannon powershot. 

120 Things in 20 years CHDK camera hack - Awesome. 

Photography - Time lapse camera

Someone nice gave me a new camera today.

Thanks someone nice.

It does time lapse photography.

You set it to take a shot every 30 seconds or whatever (30 seconds to 990 minutes), and when you feel like it, you turn it off pull out the memory card, and knit them all together with some software * so you have a movie.

It looks like this.

I've played around with it a bit, and so far the results are excellent.

It was given to me, so I have no idea how much it cost, but they tend to be called "garden cams". A search for "garden cam" will see you on the right track.

With a name like that, clearly they want me to film some aquaponics growth.

Mine is made in china and the box is labelled "Live Cam".  If you do a search for "Live Cam", you get a list of every porn site in the world.




I cant endorse it, or any of the garden cam things mentioned, because I dont know how much mine cost, I haven't used any others, and I never said I would, but I'm pretty stoked at having one to play with. From the size of the jpg's it makes, It's around a three mega pixel camera, so it should make for a reasonably decent film. It's not going to be Imax or anything, but it should be a few million times better than your average liquor store hold up security camera footage.

I suspect it will end up pointing aft, mounted on the back of my little boat for the duration of my planned, epic Murray River adventure.

I've really got to get to work on that boat.

Anyway, this version has a micro SD card slot which means it can hold up to 32 gig of pictures. I just worked out how many 4 meg photo's that is, but I closed the calculator without looking at the result, and I never go back.

So...

You'll have to work that out for yourselves.

It should hold a day's worth, and hopefully the batteries will also last a day at least. I suspect the camera goes into a sleep mode (otherwise the 990 minute setting would be a little pointless) where it doesn't draw a lot of power, but I'll be taking my trusty laptop (that was ripped from the jaws of landfill, and must be 20 years old), so charging (via USB) and emptying the memory shouldn't be an issue. Although, come to think of it, I think the new camera has more memory than the old laptop.

I'll work something out.

On a side note, and interestingly, you can drag a photo of a product into a web page showing google images, and it will search the net for images that match. I recently used it to find all the different labels that my new tent is manufactured under to see how much I got ripped off. (turns out I didn't)

But generally speaking it's a good thing to do before you buy rather than after to see if you got ripped off.

So, if you want to buy a toaster that burns tomorrows weather forecast into your toast, the same device might be marketed under three different labels, at three different price points. The exact same device, made in the same factory, not some kind of poorer quality knockoff.

It's a crazy, crazy world in which we live.

So get the photo, and save it to your desktop, then open google search, then click "images". ie go to google image search. Now grab your pic from the desktop, or another browser tab (you don't have to save it to your desktop (in chrome at least), and drag it into google image search.

It will find all the other versions and brands of your product that are using the same, or similar promotional pics.

Try it with the next product you buy, and depending on where you shop, you may be pleasantly surprised, or utterly disgusted with the universe at large.

You can also try it with a person's image, but it might make you sad. Most peoples's secret lives are very, very, boring.

Stupid universe.




*I use OpenShot Video Editor - a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0





120 Things in 20 years - Photography - Time lapse camera. We humans are just like ants, but with no sense of humour.

120 Things in 20 years - Aquaponics - Capsicum sprout

The capsicum sprouting is going fine. I think they were originally planted on the 8th of October, and  showed first signs of a shoot on the 17th. It's now the 22nd, and the one I've been taking photos of is now starting to concentrate on going up a bit.

It looks like this.

The root is a little longer, but more importantly, it all sits in the wet now. The seed is doing it's best to stand upright, and there is some kind of demarcation between underground stuff, and above ground stuff.







The surface area the roots have is amazing.  The photo doesn't really show just how fine the finest roots really are, so you'll just have to trust me.

Amazingly fine.

Big surface area.

The last 20 times or so that I have typed "capsicum", I've typed "cupsicup" instead, and my camera...

Sounds like it's in pain when I turn it on and the lens grinds to a halt.

Then for some reason sounds an alarm at half the volume of the grinding noise,  to tell me about all the grinding that's going on.

Then grinds a bit more as it tries an automatic emergency shut-down.

And the takes photo's with nice dark corners.

But it also takes pictures like the capsicum sprout above which I think is pretty good for a low end digital camera, that has taken just short of 5500 pictures, so I guess it's just getting sleepy. Perhaps that's why it does the creepy crocodile eye thing.



120 Things in 20 years wants a new SLR camera, so I can take better photos of my capsicum sprouts for my aquaponics system.

Aquaponics - Algae all clear

It looks like my algae farming days are complete.

The new system's fish tank looks like this now.

It took around a week to clear once I covered it to keep the sunlight out.

I'm told it's harmless to the fish, but that there might be a bit of a short term spike in nutrient as the dead algae breaks down.

I haven't been feeding in anticipation of this spike, so hopefully everything will be good from now on.



The photo doesn't really do it justice, but the water is very clear now. My camera tries to focus on the surface of the water so I have to focus on my feet, and then take the pic.

I miss my old film SLR camera, but I just looked at the automatic numbering of my photos, and this pic is number 4665.jpg. And this is my second camera since I started 120 things in 20 years, so If it wasn't for my little digital camera, I would need to mortgage a lung or something to pay for film.



For being able to take photos of my aquaponics algae being all clear, if you're reading, thanks from 120 Things in 20 years to those who had anything to do with making my camera. Even though I now have to force open the lens cover by hand each time I turn it on, and it makes a sound like you might expect if you poured a truck load of kitchen blenders into a giant industrial blender when I turn it off and the lens cover grinds to a close. But for nearly 5000 photos and a stack of videos for a hundred bucks or so, thanks.