Nikon DSLR owners who want to control their cameras from their PCs have a few options available to them. But while most of them offer basic functionality (i.e. aperture, shutter speed and shutter release control), the free, open source software digiCamControl seems to offer a bit more. Read more…
Photo booths are seeing a renaissance in the world of photography recently. We’re not so much talking about the photo booths you’ll find at the mall, where you feed them a dollar and they take your picture. We’re talking about little contraptions that pros are building/buying nowadays and bringing along with them to parties and wedding shoots.
One great example is the Instagram-inspired DIY photo booth put together by Alexander Morris. Unfortunately, that one required a bit of electrical DIY skill to put together yourself, so for those of you looking for something similar minus the DIY part, Photoboop may be the perfect solution. Read more…
Samsung released the open source kernel files for its new Galaxy Camera late last week, something commonly done in the smartphone world — at least with certain platforms — but a foreign concept in the world of digital photography. This opens the door to all kinds of possibilities as hackers begin to peer into the cameras brain and dream up new possibilities for how it should work.
Developers are already talking about the possibility of introducing voice calling to the camera — a feature Samsung left out of the camera, presumably to avoid cannibalizing its smartphones.
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“BYOB” is an initialism that’s readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel “open source” art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images projected all over the walls for everyone to enjoy.
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Nikon shooters: Nikon Camera Control is a new open source Windows application that lets you remotely control your Nikon DSLR using a PC and a USB cable. Features include tethering, remote control over camera’s basic settings, remote shutter triggering, an intervalometer for time-lapses, and fullscreen review.
Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the “Lightsaber”), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.
The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]
About a year ago, engineer and photo-enthusiast Morten Hjerde began brainstorming ideas for the next generation of photographic lighting after concluding that most of the lights used by photographers these days are simply glorified light bulbs.
Using embedded electronics and microprocessor programming, he set out to explore ways to create a different kind of light. A light that would go where the current lights could not go. Exploring the possibility and feasibility of actual digital light. Light that could be pushed and tweaked like you push and tweak the pixels on your computer screen. [#]
He set up a company called Rift Labs, and decided to open source the design and software involved in creating this digital light source. The video above provides some interesting background on the project.
A day after Carl Zeiss announced they would be joining the Micro Four Thirds format, Sony is striking back by announcing that they will be releasing specifications for its E-mount, allowing lens makers to develop third-party lenses for the NEX line of mirrorless cameras and camcorders. What’s more, Carl Zeiss, Cosina, Sigma and Tamron have already committed to manufacturing lenses for the format.
It’ll be interesting to see how this growing war between mirrorless camera formats plays out.
Image credit: SONY NEX-5 by DORONKO
Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn’t it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There’s an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here’s the description:
Paddy radically improves the workflow in Lightroom 3.0 by allowing you assign any adjustment setting – including moving the sliders and applying a preset – to keys, your number keypad, external keypads, or a MIDI controller. This gives you all editing (and some other) tools of Lightroom at the push of one button. You do not need the mouse any more to get to presets or to adjust the sliders.
The software is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded here. Sadly, it’s currently only available for Windows.
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It’s almost a given for new Canon DSLRs to have an HD video recording mode, but older Canons can also capture HD video with the open source software EOS Camera Movie Record. The program allows you to shoot HD 720p video with any Canon EOS camera that has LiveView capabilities. The software runs off of your computer and captures HD video from the LiveView of a tethered camera.
Photographer Peter Arboine has an article up at DIY Photography about how he uses the software to shoot video with a Canon 40D.
Obviously, the fact that your camera has to remain tethered limits use of this video feature largely to studio use, but it’s a neat workaround for Canon owners. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Canon program has been in the works for over a year, there’s still no Nikon equivalent.
