… in my world, there is Photography, Astronomy, Electronics, Software Engineering, 3d printing and much more
At night, with long(er) exposures, the slider concept to stop for each frame, proofs to be perfect!
A test at night with 10 second single exposures:
Crisp and clear images due to stop-motion. But not yet fluid motion (there seems to be a bug in the motor control).
To be continued 🙂
After several days of building and coding, the slider was ready to perform a first real world test. Even if the electronics have not yet been encased (all the wires are going wild around the platform), this was proof of concept…
For quite some time I would like to create night time movies in hyperlapses. For me, the most stunning results may be created by moving the camera along a linear path by the use of motorized sliders. Motorized sliders, which are more than 2 meters long, have an impressive price tag. Further more, these tools are bulky and heavy, especially when the setup attached to weighs in a few kilos.
Therefore I decided to build my own with a few goals in mind:
To achieve all or most of these goals, I came up with a design built around carbon fiber tubes with aluminum screw-in fixtures. Appropriate tubes may be built from scratch or are readily available for camera gimbals. I chose the camera gimbal extensions, as there is no big price difference to buying stock material. Further more, they come in a handy size of +/- 40cm in length.
The end supports will have to hold the tubes as well as a gear belt, along which the slider cart will be driven. For long setups, I created supports, to prevent bending and excessive stress to the tubes. Both types of support will have legs as well as tripod mount screw holes (3/8 UNC thread)
The slider cart consists of 4 blocks holding 3 pulley wheels each. The blocks are attached to a base plate (in test setup a plywood sheet). In the middle of the base plate lies the motor unit consisting of a steper motor and 4 guiding wheels to create enough tension for the gear belt to be driven by the motor.
All in all, the shopping list is really limited, as most parts were 3D-printed. What I had to purchase or use (most parts were already to be found in the workshop) was:
Most of the time I spent was in CAD constructing the parts. Printing took about 3 days. The pulley wheels have to be sanded for a smooth surface before coating with rubber. The remaining time was spent in cutting, drilling and tapering the aluminum parts, before all parts could be attached together.
The first test run was more than pleasing. See for yourself:
The next thing to do is to create a control box with all the features implemented for every day use 🙂
After working through all the data collected from the solar eclipse in August, I combined the wide angle images (8mm lens) and the images captured through my 600mm travel telescope to timelapses. The wide-angle video is the result of more than 800 single exposures, covering the day from around 6am till 5pm. The most interresting part around totality is significantly slowed down, as totality would be over in a blink. During partial phase, I was so busy trying to fix my automated triggering system, that I did not realize the clouds until post processing. So it was really pleasing to see all the clouds above my site vanish moments before totality began. On the other hand, the remaining clouds increased the view of the shadow of the moon passing over, which is just amazing!
The inlay in the wide angle video is derived from the high res video.
I am really pleased with the results, but check for yourself!
I condensed in this video the first 18 days on the road to a 5 minute movie. A lot of countryside besides the roads may be seen, but the video gives just a hint of all the beauty lying beyond, when you get out of the car an make a few paces. So, get out of the car and enjoy the places you would otherwise rush by 😉
The following map (generated in google maps with a few marker points along the route; the full path would exceed the maximum allowed waypoints) shows the coarse path we went:
About the video:
– 4K action cam attached to the upper right corner of the windscreen with a suction cup mount
– camera captured a still image every 3 seconds
– covering 19 days (18 on the road)
– almost 80 hours driving
– more than 3500 miles covered in the video
– 94500 images in 257GB data
In the night of 2017-08-14 I created a timelapse with the milky way travelling above Monument Valley. Clouds and the crescent moon did interfere the beautiful sight of the millions of stars above one of the most impressive sights in the US. On the other hand, an amazing sunrise compensated for the second half of the night 🙂
Holidays… Usually I like to go on holidays with minimum amount of planning (ahead). Though this time, planning started more than 6 months prior to departure. The reason for the long planning phase was the total solar eclipse of 2017 (also cited as “The Great American Eclipse”). Choosing the right place and combining the eclipse day with sight seeing, adventure, photography opportunities, etc. took quite some time.
The final tour plan consisted of 4 major themes:
Including Florida, we made a tour of impressive 5000 miles, 6 National Parks in 10 states. (If you are interrested in our tour detailes, drop me a message)
Here is a small set of photos, representing the wonderful places we’ve been to. (For the solar eclipse photos, see the previous post)
All the effort to travel around the world for just a few images… Well, it was really a challenge to carry the 60+kg equippment to Riverton, Wyoming. It was even more challenging to try to last-minute fix an error in my computer controlled camera trigger system. And last but not least, 2 cameras stopped capturing during totality… It would have been a total disappointment, if…
… if my best camera / lens combination I had set up wouldn’t have done the following 🙂
See for yourself, why I am absolutely happy:
On a wonderful day with blue skies I took my (newly) modified full spectrum camera to Schlossberg in downtown Graz. All images shot with a 720nm infrared filter attached to the lens…
After converting my Sony A6000 camera to full spectrum capabilities, I finally got a sunny day to test the “new” camera, using a 720nm IR filter…
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