Jess decided to get uppity with me and bash me over the head until I went into the garage and took photos. Below are the results. We tried to get a photo of each fish but that’s really hard. Once we’ve accumulated a complete collection I’ll put up a composite.
… and finally, Jess wouldn’t let me out of the cold until she had a few full-tank shots to show off with.
… because she brought me <Rod Roddy Voice>AN UNDERWATER CAMERA!</Rod Roddy>
The camera itself is pretty small and very nice. An Olympus 8080, it’s highly desired amongst (San Diego, at least) underwater photographers for it’s amazing macro functionality. Testing this thing out was a blast, you can put the front element of the lens on something and it’ll focus if there’s enough light!
The housing on the other hand, is immense. Rated to 40m (130 ft. the recreational diving limit) it has to put up with a lot of pressure and not leak. The camera sits on a sled which is inserted into the housing on rails. Everything stays nice and stable like that.
You put a little packet of silica (several included) between the bottom of the sled and the housing to prevent fogging. Very nice. There are then two latches that seal the housing shut. Two o-rings go all the way around to provide a nice seal. All of the controls work very well and are easy to press. There’s a trade-off with these controls; they should be easy to press, but shouldn’t be activated by the ambient water pressure at depth. This looks like it’ll work.
Hopefully this coming weekend the surf will be down enough that we can take the housing down with a lead weight, to see if it leaks. We’ll do that a few times before we trust it with the camera. After that, I can’t wait to get some photos. I think there are one or two people reading this blog that don’t believe I actually go diving. Now I’ll have proof!
Here’s some more photos of the camera/housing set up.
Here’s a few photos taken with the Olympus. The first two are outside the housing and the last is within. I think I got better focus on the last one because I could set the massive housing on something to hold it steady!
This image has not been altered in anyway. I sat in front of my DLP TV with my Canon Digital Rebel XT and a 50mm lens. This is exactly as it came out of the camera. The image on the TV looked entirely normal at the time.
What we see here is an exploitation of how my DLP TV works. The projector works like so: light bulb → color wheel → matrix of mirrors → optics → screen. The color wheel and mirror matrix are kept in synch. The mirror matrix knows when the “red” section is in front of the bulb, and turns on the pixels that are supposed to be red. The same thing happens with “blue”, “green” and various other shades on the wheel. You can actually rate the quality of a DLP projector by the number of colors on this wheel. Theoretically there could be any number, though 16 is pretty common.
Since our eyes and brains don’t process things very quickly, even something refreshing just a little faster than 60 Hz doesn’t seem to flicker very much.
So I set my camera to Tv (Timing Value) mode and set the shutter speed to 1/1,000th of a second. By doing this, I’m able to capture almost 4 distinct colors from the color wheel! You can see from top to bottom, orange, pink, blue, and green. So I know at least these colors are in the color wheel on my TV, and probably a few shades in between. Personally, I think this “modern art” style stuff is pretty cool.
Here’s another snapshot with a shutter speed of 1/2,000th of a second. Notice how there are only two colors? In fact, you can see black bars here for which I can think of two explanations. First, this could be a border between sections on a color wheel. It’s possible, but I find it unlikely. Secondly, it could be the period of time during which the system is re-calibrating for the next color. I think that one is more likely.
The cleaning kit is kind of obvious. Check out the rocket blower.
Having celebrated 5 years at my current employer I received a $200 gift card. I immediately turned around and looked at how I could get the most stuff out of it. Turns out B&H was the right place to go. I managed to get:
. I managed to get all this stuff for only $3.45! Sweet!
What this means is that I can use the tent + lights to take better product style shots, e.g. of gundams. To test everything out I took a picture of the Rocket Air blower I got. I think it turned out pretty well.
The spirit level means that taking panoramas will be easier. Having the camera totally level on the ball head, and the tripod totally level means less wasted data. That’s a good thing since more of each photo will end up in the final product.
Friday night I got the idea that stitching together loads of photos to make a panorama would be a blast. I was pretty sure there were a few places in Coronado that would make terrific vantage points. We ended up picking Centennial Park as a good location.
Tripod in hand we set up shop and started panning and snapping away. Having read some time back that there should be about 30% overlap to make aligning easier, I ended up taking only a few photos. Jess suggested a switch to portrait orientation to get some of the water reflections included. A portrait orientation panorama from the convention center to the USS midway using the 100mm lens required 17 photos.
By the time we got back home and I’d loaded all the photos into Photoshop’s Photostitch script, a problem appeared. The sky kept changing colors, creating awful bands across the photo where the seams were. This clearly wasn’t going to work. Reviewing the photos illuminated us to the problem: different exposure settings! I had set the camera to manual focus, natch, but had put it in Av (aperture value) mode! Thinking the lighting would be equal enough since it was a clear day, I didn’t notice when the exposure times changed: from 1/20s to 1/45s. This changed things dramatically. Since you can’t really fix that in RAW post-production we had to reformulate our plan.
Later that night we headed back out to find a clear sky between Coronado and downtown San Diego. Perfect! After tweaking the settings a bit we arrived at: 2 seconds @ f/2.8 on ISO 200. Awesome. In the LCD reviews the photos looked awesome — the camera was catching much more information than our eyes were. I made another pass with a 4 second exposure to satisfy Jess’ curiosity and then we packed up and went home.
This morning I loaded the photos again and found — the same banding. What was left? Finally it occurred to me: Auto White Balance! Since I’d absentmindedly left the camera in AWB the color tint would be different from frame to frame. Loading all the images into CS2′s RAW importer I fixed this by setting them all to ‘Tungsten’, which was pretty good. Running these through Photostitch, now corrected, revealed: more banding.
After reading a few tutorials online I concluded that my photos were OK, it was Photoshop that was being a punk. A bit more research led me to DoubleTake, which had some good reviews. After some dragging, dropping, and clicking (it couldn’t figure out to auto-rotate the portrait orientation photos) I had a decent looking panorama. All I had to do was tweak some of the overlaps by widening some, shifting others, and bingo!
There are two versions available. Both have the DoubleTake watermark on them because I didn’t pay for the software yet. If I end up doing this again, I probably will. I’ll be emailing Henrik soon enough.
UPDATED: Files don’t have watermarks now, since I paid for DoubleTake.
Yesterday Jessica found information for the San Diego Big Bay Fireworks Show. Seeing as how there were going to be four barges, we had to go. This is our story.
According to the website the show would start at 9pm. Looking at the PDF map it became clear that Point Loma would be the spot for good photos since you could see all four barges. The Cabrillo Monument looked especially posh. As we made our way out the lack of traffic was an indication of something big. Either we’d been part of a small minority to find the map, or something was up. Applying Occam’s razor made it clear: the monument closes at 5pm.
So we spun around and had a new mission: trespassing!
It turned out there were quite a few other people in a similar position. As we drove around we just followed other cars for a while, generally heading towards the bay. Eventually we came across people walking down the street — a good sign. A few more turns and we were going down a hill into the bay. Jess jumped out of the car as I spun around to find parking. There was already a large crowd down the street and several parties going. Obviously this is a good place to be!
It took me just a few seconds to find parking and return to Jess configuring the tripod in somebody’s driveway. Just after Jess let me peek through the viewfinder, a young lady approached us:
Young Lady: You want to take pictures from our second story? Us: Ummm, yeah if it’s OK with you. Young Lady: Yeah so long as I get a copy of the pictures. Us: Yeah we can email you anything you want.
She led us to a house down and in through a garage and up some stairs and into a room with an expansive view of the bay. She left as her cousin arrived to supervise us. I quickly set up the tripod as Jessica and our hosts: Ivan and Laura, chatted away. As it turns out, Laura is an aspiring photographer and had some wonderful questions about our gear and such.
The view was spectacular, as was our hosts hospitality. It makes me incredibly happy to know that there are still such nice people in San Diego, even after all of its growth. Below are the best photos from over 130!
Monday night Jessica and I went to Fiesta Island to photograph SeaWorld’s fireworks. SeaWorld runs fireworks every night around 9:30, 10:00. I thought this would be good practice before trying to take pictures of any 4th of July fireworks. Turns out, I was right!
I’ve decided to make a new light box. The last one I made was constructed easily out of 5 pieces of white foam board, and some masking tape. While it worked, it’s not exactly portable. Plus, it’s pretty fragile. All of these qualities made it suck.
To remedy the situation, I’ll be making a new frame based light box out of PVC. It’s similar in concept to the other ones you maybe seen on the web, but the plans are much more simple.
Equipment
½ inch PVC, at least 20 ft.
4 PVC three-way corners (not tees!) — one end is threaded
4 male slip-to-thread adapters
4 caps
Optionally: 2 small plastic coated hooks
Additional
2 cans Rust-oleum plastic primer
2 cans spray paint
1 can Plasti-dip
Spray paint trigger adapter
masking tape
Fine grained sand paper
String and a well ventilated area
Assembly
Cut 4 legs of equal length
Cut 2 legs of whatever width you want the box to be
Cut 2 legs of whatever depth you want the box to be
Shove the caps on to one end of each leg and the slip-to-thread adapters on the other end
Shove the sides of the box into the corners as needed. It’s easiest to make a square, but you should go crazy.
Test fit everything and make sure you like it: screw the legs into the corners.
Painting
It really helps if you have something you can hang the 5 major pieces off of.
Mask off the female ends of the connectors. Trim up the tape so there’s not too much excess.
Mask off the feet of the legs
Sand everything down, then rinse it off and dry it
Mask off the male ends of the connectors.
Tie some string around the threads of each leg and tie them up for painting.
Tie some string around some part of the square. If you wanted to be tricky you could drill a small hole somewhere, run string through it and tie a knot in the string so it hangs off there. Tie it up for painting
Spray with primer. Make sure you can’t see the natural markings on the PVC. Anything that’s not white now won’t be the right color later.
wait…
Paint with your top coat
remove masking tape, resume hanging, and wait… (you’re probably done for the day)
Mask the bottom of the legs (just above the caps) and dip them in the Plasti-Dip. This will make them pretty grippy and non-skid. Awesome. It’s hard to get an even coat if there’s paint on them, hence the masking earlier.
Optionally: Pick a section to be the back and screw the hooks in.
You now have a pretty (depending on the paint color you chose) light box for your photography projects! I’ll have pictures of mine up in a little while.
On Monday Jessica and I finished the Gundam we’d been working on. Last night I took some photos of it in our home made light box. Not five minutes after downloading the photos, Jessica has picked one out to be wallpapper! Awesome! As she makes more I’ll put them up.
UPDATE: If anybody was wondering this is Perfect Grade W-GUNDAM Zero Custom NEW MOBILE REPORT GUNDAM WING Endless Waltz
Yesterday Jessica and I popped into Balboa Park — forgetting it was Earth Day. The place was packed but we totally lucked out and found parking within 1 minute.
Let me tell you, it was Smelly Hippy™ central. After walking over the Laurel Street Bridge you’re assaulted by singing Hari Krishna’s and people handing out leaflets for their “indoor gardening” supplies. Whatever, it was kind of fun. I’m still too shy to take pictures of people so we mostly took pictures of flowers in the Botanical Building. I especially like this orchid — it’s got teeth!
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The camera itself is pretty small and very nice. An Olympus 8080, it’s highly desired amongst (San Diego, at least) underwater photographers for it’s amazing macro functionality. Testing this thing out was a blast, you can put the front element of the lens on something and it’ll focus if there’s enough light!
This image has not been altered in anyway. I sat in front of my DLP TV with my Canon Digital Rebel XT and a 50mm lens. This is exactly as it came out of the camera. The image on the TV looked entirely normal at the time.
Here’s another snapshot with a shutter speed of 1/2,000th of a second. Notice how there are only two colors? In fact, you can see black bars here for which I can think of two explanations. First, this could be a border between sections on a color wheel. It’s possible, but I find it unlikely. Secondly, it could be the period of time during which the system is re-calibrating for the next color. I think that one is more likely.
The cleaning kit is kind of obvious. Check out the rocket blower.
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![7322×1200 JPG [10.1 MB]](http://www.toasterwaffles.com/wp-content/images/sd-night-panorama-7322x1200.jpg){kind=link}