The straightforward stuff was to do close up shots of the moulding around the top of the penthouse, which is about 12′ or so above the walking surface of the roof (and a good 250 feet above Market Street below). Here’s what I got:

This is on the west face of the building, so it’s seen wind about every day for 93 years. Now, if you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll notice that this is the west face, and there’s highlights on it? There’s a building right across the street that reflects sunlight back onto the west face of a lot of the buildings.

This one is right in the same area, but gives you a better idea of where this all is. For a better idea of where I was standing, here’s the panorama I shot:

Okay, that was all easy and safe– then comes the extreme stuff– this whole series was inspired by an article about Peter B Kaplan I read. I’m certainly not as talented as he is, but here’s my first attempts:

Alameda 4th of July Parade Time Lapse from Ben Peoples on Vimeo.

Playing with my new timer controller prototype, I shot a time lapse video with my DSLR of the Alameda 4th of July Parade. Rather than shoot RAW or even full res, these were shot at 1500×1000 and then cropped and scaled to the 1280×720 size. Stitched together into the movie in iMovie, I was then able to export it as a reasonably small video for internet use. It’s also available at full quality around 500MB if you’re interested, and of course I have all the stills if someone wants those.

Happy Fourth Everyone!

Anyway, I picked up some parts I wanted to play with anyway:

The upper bit is an Arduino — it’s an ATMega168 AVR microcontroller, a USB interface, and some other cool bits. It’s designed to take “shield” boards, which plug into the top of it. It’s on 0.1″ pin spacing, so you can use perfboards to prototype things up.

The lower bit is the Bodhilabs switch-mode power supply. It takes 1.1V to 4.5V and steps that up to 5V. This module is set up to take two AA batteries (NiMH or Alkaline) and provide 5V to the Arduino. I’ve got another one that takes a single AAA and outputs 3.3V (more on that one later).

Here’s what I built with it (working prototype, all but one function rolling):

It’s a little ugly right now, but works! Basic functions listed:

1. Triggers D70s via IR and my film camera via transistor.
2. Three modes:
   1. “Trigger” - just triggers the cameras when you push the red button
   2. “Intervalometer” - Triggers the cameras every “n” seconds or minutes (range is 1 second to 6 minutes)
   3. “Long exposure” - Triggers the camera for a long exposure (range is 1 minute to 6 hours) (D70s only goes to 30m, but the film camera can go all 6 hours)
3. The trimpot sets the time, it’s dual-scaled: 0-1:00 is half the range, 1:01-6:00 is the other half of the range. Basically, the difference between a 2m and a 4m exposure is a lot more important than the difference between a 2h05m and a 2h15m exposure.
4. Currently not implemented is the Xbee-link. This becomes the red button, up to 300′ away (or more, I got 1000′ unreliably out of my Series 2.5 xbees). This is actually just using the GPIO capability of the Xbees, so the remote is entirely dumb– an xbee, a battery, and a switch.

Update!  I uploaded the source code, it’s available here: http://photo.benpeoples.com/dist/arduino/sketch_080625a.zip

Media inquiries regarding these photos can be directed to my e-mail or 888 number below.

To much fanfare, a lot of wine, and a whole lot of vegetables, my photography show at the Alameda Naval Air Museum opened.  Thanks to all those who supported the effort & stopped by today. More information on the photography show is at the Alameda Project website.

Hi there! It’s been a while, I know, but as it goes, things have been pretty busy. Here’s what’s up:

• My photo booth & craftcon session made mention on etsy’s blog.
• I helped man the Kite Aerial Photography booth at Maker Faire, the booth mostly organized by Cris Benton.
• I got a short mention on c|net’s Maker Faire updates. — 4th paragraph from the bottom.
• I am incredibly happy to announce that my photography show is opening May 24th at the Alameda Naval Air Museum, and runs Saturdays and Sundays through June 24th. Drop me an e-mail if you want an invite to the opening. (Above photo is one of that collection).

Lecture notes are here.

Photos from the CraftCon Gala Photobooth are here. If you use them, attribute/link benpeoples.com.