Bay bridge night

For $5.00 — including shipping — this is (5) color 4×6 prints, selected from my favorites.

Rooftop of Hobart Building, looking at 44 Montgomery

Available as an 8×12 print, direct from the photographer for $35.00, including shipping.

(Please note, the cart system and such hasn’t been fully tested… let me know if you order something and then don’t hear from me)

I’ve finished out 90% of the hardware for my “production version” of the camera controller. There’s a couple of software glitches that need to be resolved, but for now it’s a totally functional device.

The first bit is the radio remote/flashlight:

Thanks to the brilliant design on the Xbee radios, this remote consists of: (1) Xbee module, (1) Xbee breakout, (1) Bodhilabs AAA 3.3v, (1) switch, (1) Red LED w/ resistor. The switch is the sexy nav-switch from Sparkfun, which is a center push, and two contacts in each direction. I’m using the center for the shutter (contact closure on the xbee), and one direction of the switch to light up the red LED. The Xbee is programmed to forward the contact closure to it’s pair on the reciever.

On the receiving/controller end, we have this:

Parts list is a little longer here, but the basic components are a Bodhilabs vpack stepping (2) AA batteries up to 5v, a 2×16 serial LCD, another xbee breakout board, a trimwheel potentiometer, and my custom-built controller.

I did a custom pcb from batchpcb to cut down on size– it’s an 8MHz Atmega168 board, compatible with Arduino, and actually has the Arduino NG bootloader, which is slick. The custom board runs at 3.3v, which makes the interface with the Xbee really simple. That does mean some inefficiency in the power supply (switchmode to 5v, and then linear regular to 3.3v), but the high current device, the LCD, is running at the full 5v.

Overall, pretty cool, so far so good.

Cesar Augustus once said “Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.”, which roughly translates to: “Very cheap photographic prints in August!” — I’ve discounted all of my prints on esty to $15 >including shipping<. This is all 8×12 and 12×18 prints, formerly $35-$45.

So head on over there, and buy some prints!

I’m planning a couple trips this fall that will involve night photography, in trying to work out the various astronomical timings, I developed the above graph. The blue zone in the middle is when the sun is up, the blue and black triangles are the moon’s rises and sets. The up triangle means the moonrise time, the down triangle means the moonset. From this relationship, you can get the phase of the moon. If the sun and the moon rise together, you have a new moon. If the moon rises when the sun sets, you have a full moon.

Data pulled from here.

The new controller has opened up some interesting opportunities. Today I did some interesting work by putting a tripod head on an 11′ light stand, and then standing on the roof of the Hobart Building and taking various straightforward and somewhat crazy shots.

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:

Not as foggy as some 4ths, but it gave a rather unique look to the fireworks this year. Managed to get some awesome shots of it. These I’m releasing as both 12×18 prints and 20×30 prints (they’re that good). You can pick them up over on my etsy shop.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve begun selling prints on Etsy.  Only a few are up right now, but more will be coming over the next few weeks.  If there’s something you’ve seen on the blog that you want a print of, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.  Click here for the store.

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!

UPDATE: New controller here

Early June, we do a trip up to Mendocino every year. It’s really dark up there, so sky/night photography is very cool to do up there. However, I’m really a morning person. Morning people and night photography don’t work well– especially on the pacific coast where you can have skyglow from ocean reflections well past midnight in the summer. Really cool night photography frequently requires hours long exposures. This one, is only about half an hour (apologies for the quality of the scan, high quality forthcoming):

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