Ingredients:

1- Digital SLR
1- Older Twin Lens Reflex camera (Rollie, Yashica, etc. I used a $5.00 eBay Kodak Duaflex IV)
1- Macro Lens (mine is a 60mm 1:1)
1- Heavy duty cardboard tubing
1- Roll of gaffers tape

Remove the popup shade covering the viewfinder on the top of the Twin Lens camera. Combine ingredients. Enjoy!

What exactly is this going to accomplish?
Nostalgia of coarse! More specifically, your photos should have a distressed border and added textures from the focusing screen on the twin lens camera. Every camera is different and each will give a unique look. I’ve also noticed that by tilting your SLR slightly, you can accomplish partial focus effects similar to that of lensbabies. Welcome to the world of TTV (Through The Viewfinder) photography!

Tips: 

• Shoot at a super high ISO for that extra “graininess”  (I used 1600 for most of these shots).
• Keep in mind that the more you stop down, the more imperfections, dust, scratches will show up.
• For expired film looking color, experiment with different “incorrect” white-balance settings.
• This camera setup makes for great candid shots because the camera doesn’t appear to be pointing at your subject
• Don’t permanently attach the D-SLR to the tube. This allows for camera tilting to achieve a partial focus effect.

A few more….

Here’s the setup.

For more on this style of photography, google “through the viewfinder” or “TTV photography.”

Banding reduction: The Basic Idea
(1). Compose, focus and take a “normal” frame of the scene.
(2). Without moving the scanner, place some white diffusion material (heavy cotton without texture) over the lens. Evenly illuminate the cotton and take a second frame. This is simply a photo of the banding and imperfections of the scanner. This is the “bias” frame. The idea comes from astrophotography, where bias frames are used to remove spots and dust on CCD cameras as well as objects such as planes in the sky.
(3). In Photoshop, place the bias frame in a layer on top of the normal frame.
(4). Invert the bias frame layer and change the blending mode to color dodge.
(5). making sure the photo is rotated so that any remaining banding is horizontal, de-interlace both odd and even lines.

If anyone has any ideas on removing the remaining banding, please let me know. More updates to come…

The 400 Megapixel Project – Part 1

The 400 Megapixel Project – Part 2

After the modification, I tried my first medium-low resolution scan (50 megapixels at 1200dpi, 16bit grayscale). Anything higher quality would’ve taken too long to scan since I still haven’t designed a way to mount the scanner to the camera. I had to basically hand hold it. The scan took about 30 seconds and I moved a little bit. Also the focusing was done in low light without a loupe and the camera was working at a fairly wide open aperture for the format, so the photo is a bit softer than it could be.

Here is a rough crop from the photo above compared to a similarly composed photo taken by my 12mp D300 with a roughly equivalent focal length.

Keep in mind that this project is still a very early work in progress. I plan to eliminate the rest of the vignetting as well as the banding and eventually the camera will shoot color 400 megapixel images.

For part 1 of the project, click here.

Check out the concept and my progress after the break….

The concept:

The idea is simple, but not original: attach a modified scanner to the back of a camera. However, this will require heavy modification of the scanner. Also, mounting the scanner to the camera and focusing will require some ingenuity.

The Scanner:

Canon LIDE 80 (for now) – $30 on ebay
 
Canon’s LIDE scanners use a unique color LED system combined with a mirror-less micro-lens design that makes them perfect for photography with some heavy modification. These scanners are also great because they only require a USB cable for power allowing for more portability (connecting to a laptop on location).

The Camera:

8×10 View camera – $200 used
 
A large format camera (or at lease its lens) is needed to project an image large enough to nearly cover the entire bed of the scanner.

Limitations:

• Exposure times are slow and anything moving will look oddly distorted. This effect can be very artistic, but is not always intended.
• A 400mp 16-bit raw file will be around 3gb and will take a very long time to expose!
• Scanning in color will require multiple exposures as well as an expensive IR blocking filter.
• Banding and scan lines need special treatment (multiple exposures).
• The setup is very large and cumbersome.
• After disabling the LED in the scanner, some software won’t allow you to use the scanner

Current Progress (a few hours into the project):

Step 1: Remove the lid 

Step 2: Using a flat-head screw driver, carefully remove the plastic guides on the long sides of the scanner. 

Step 3: Leaving the film guide attached to the glass, slide the glass toward the back of the scanner, lift up on the film guide end, then pull the glass straight out. 

Step 4(a): Here is a view of the micro lens array (the black dotted strip) and the LED (the white strip near the top) The lens array is hot glued in and is a bit of a pain to remove. 

 
Step 4(b): Using some needle-nosed pliers, carefully remove the micro-lens array. Start at one end and pull up until the glue breaks free moving down the line.

Step 5 – Disable the LED( sorry but no photo): Use gaffers or thick electrical tape to cover the White LED strip leaving about 1-1/4” of the LED exposed at each end. Covering the entire LED would be ideal , but most scanning software won’t allow the scanner to work without some light shining though. 

 
Here is a comparison shot  of my progress so far. Note that the CIS housing creates a keyhole effect which I will later correct. The scanner also shows heavy banding that can be fixed with dark-frames (similar to the frames I use to get rid of noise on my star streak photos). Also notice that the sheep is white in the scanner images. That’s because the scanner scans near infrared.
   

Goals to complete this project:

• Modify the CIS housing to remove the keyhole vignette
• Create a “holder” to attach the scanner to the camera (I was holding it by hand in the photos above) The holder should allow me to focus on ground-glass before attaching the scanner
• Figure out a way around the software limitations so that the entire LED can be covered up
• Get a IR blocking filter (B+W and tiffen both make them)

Credit goes to Mike Golembewski for his in depth article on how to do this.

Keep watching for updates….

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any damage to your flash or radio trigger. I am not an electrician. Please try this at your own risk.

What you’ll need

• Double ended 1/8″ Stereo cable (you can use mono or some old headphones which will be cheaper, but this guide shows a stereo plug because I had one on hand)
• Leviton Lamp plug found at Home Depot for less that $1.00 each (Home Depot doesn’t seem to sell them online) Be sure to get the solderless kind unless you want to solder.
• Phillips screw driver
• Wire cutter/stripper

Cut the Stereo cable in half. Strip the wires and attach as shown in the photo above, cut the negative wire (small black) short. Note that you can make two sync cables out of the one audio cable.

Screw back together (was the photo above really necessary? And what’s up with all these parentheses?)

Test it out and show off your super-ugly new sync cable!

]]> http://www.liquidinplastic.com/2008/06/how-to-make-your-own-18-miniphone-to-household-sync-cable-cheap/feed/ 0 http://www.liquidinplastic.com/2008/06/startrails/ http://www.liquidinplastic.com/2008/06/startrails/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:22:25 +0000 Dan Newton http://liquidinplastic.com/2008/06/startrails/ Ever since the first time I looked in a book with long-exposure photography, I’ve loved the look of trailing stars in photographs. The idea is simple, expose for a long enough period of time to record the rotation of the stars as the Earth spins. My own attempts were never very successful using film due to the negative effects of reciprocity and my lack of technical skills and patience. Even later, when I finally got a digital SLR camera with the battery life to pull off an hour long exposure, my star streak photos were always sub par, riddled with technical and aesthetic problems. One of my problems was that I always tried to shoot star streaks as if I were shooting a film camera: One very long, guessed exposure, teetering on the edge of my battery life. As I will outline, there are many problems with this technique and there is a much better solution!

The “Traditional” Method of Getting Star Streak Photographs

Things used to seem quite simple. Find a dark sky without too much light pollution, calculate an exposure based on the ISO, working aperture and phase of the moon, place your camera on “bulb” mode and expose for a long enough period of time so that the stars streak through the sky as the Earth rotates. As simple as this seems, there are many problems with this method. For one, while digital cameras don’t have the issue of reciprocity like film does, they do have the inherent problem of noise. Without getting too technical, all digital cameras use an internal imaging device to convert light into an electric charge, this is either a CCD or a CMOS in most cases. As the camera exposes, and depending on the ambient temperature, the sensor begins to heat up and produce thermal noise or dark current. This can heavily degrade the detail and quality of an image. Most modern digital SLRs have built in long exposure noise reduction by silently taking second “dark frame” for the same length of the first, thus removing the dark current. One of the major problems with the built in noise reduction is that in order to be effective, the camera has to noise reduce under the same ambient temperature as the original exposure(meaning the photographer has to stay on location for twice the amount of time), the other problem is battery life limitations. With my older Nikon D200 + battery grip, I could pull off about an hour of exposure + an hour of noise reduction and just barely have juice to preview the final shot.

Another problem with the so called “Traditional” method is balancing a light polluted sky with the foreground. Unless you are just going for a shot of the stars in the sky and don’t care about any foreground detail, you are most likely going to be very frustrated when you find that the sky is too bright to make out the stars due to light pollution if exposing for foreground detail (see the photo on the left). City lights, car headlights and especially a large phase moon can light up the sky dramatically brighter than the foreground leaving you with the choice of either underexposure your foreground, or losing precious star detail and contrast by exposing for foreground detail. Painting the foreground with light is one solution, but doesn’t solve the other problems.

Stacking, the (Almost) Perfect Solution!

So instead of shooting a single long exposure, we can take a large number of short exposures equaling the length of time that our single long exposure would have been and “stack” them together. Let me clarify. Lets say you would like to have an hour long exposure of the stars moving across the sky. You could set up and shoot an hour long single exposure and run in to the previously mentioned problems, or instead you could do the following…

Shooting:

1. You’ll need a fully charged battery (battery grip is recommended), a cable release or remote, a tripod and a memory card capable of holding a few hundred shots.
2. Set your quality to .jpg-fine or RAW (Keep in mind that if you want to shoot raw, you will have to batch process a large number of files).
3. On a tripod, compose your shot and set your shutter speed to the slowest speed your camera will shoot continuously, most digital SLRs will shoot as slow as 30 seconds, don’t use bulb.
4. Taking a few test exposures, set your exposure (using your ISO and aperture) so that you can see stars in the sky. Don’t overexpose the sky, we want a fairly dark histogram, with a very small spike near the right for the stars. Also, don’t worry about getting too much foreground detail in your exposure right now, just focus on the stars.
5. Set your white-balance for the sky. This is a matter of personal preference and it will vary depending on the light pollution.
6. Turn off any kind of long-exposure noise reduction that is built in to your camera. High ISO NR can be left on.
7. Set your camera to continuous drive mode.
8. Lock your cable release/remote so that the camera is stuck firing continuously. Now the camera will shoot one 30 second exposure after another until you stop it.
9. Stop after an hour (or however long your predetermined exposure is). The longer you let the camera shoot, the more the earth will rotate and the longer the star streaks. Also, keep an eye on the camera as some cameras do not have the buffer to handle so many shots in a row.
10. Don’t move the camera! Once you’re done exposing, you still need to shoot a manual dark frame for noise reduction. Put your lens cap on, make sure the viewfinder doesn’t have any light shining into it and expose for 30 seconds.
11. The last thing you need to do it shoot a brighter foreground frame for the detail in the foreground. Put your camera on bulb, and make an exposure long enough to get good detail in the foreground, don’t worry about overexposing the sky. I recommend using the same aperture and ISO setting as the 30 second exposures for noise consistency. You can enable in camera long exposure noise reduction for this if you want, or you can shoot another dark frame with the lens cap on of the same length for noise reduction. I recommend turning NR back on for this if you have the time/battery life.
12. Go home and follow the next section for processing.

Processing:

Windows Users:
Note that Windows users can also follow the OSX instructions for a bit more work, but also a little more control.

1. Download StarTrails from HERE. We will also be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 (although you can probably use CS2 or even Elements 6).
2. Open StarTrails and go to File –> “Open Images” and select all of the frames except for the dark frame and foreground frame.
3. Go to File —> “Open Dark Frames” and select your darkframe
4. Click Build —> Star Trails and give it a few minutes. You can watch as the star streaks grow.
5. Save as a .tiff file and open the .tiff in Photoshop
6. Also open the foreground exposure jpeg and paste it as a new layer on top of your stacked .tiff file in photoshop
7. Create a black mask on the foreground layer and paint in the foreground carefully (see graphic above for example).
8. Apply curves, noise reduction and other editing adjustments and your done!

OSX Users:

Since the StarTrails Software doesn’t work in OSX, we can use Photoshop to do the same thing. Its a bit more work, but it gives you more individual frame control. There are two ways to do it:

Method 1: Use the CS3 script under File —> Scripts —> “Load Files into Stack.” Open all of your exposures except the foreground frame. Change each layer’s blending type to “lighten” and the dark frame’s to “difference.” This is time consuming and tedious. I recommend method 2.

Method 2: Download this Photoshop action (this does everything above automatically, except the dark and foreground frames). Follow the directions on the site (one step). I recommend deleting the action step where it flattens the layers. Then add your dark frame as a new layer, change the blend type to difference. Next add your foreground image as a layer, create a black mask and paint in the foreground. Apply curves, noise reduction and other adjustments as needed.

Almost Perfect? What gives?

While the stacking technique gives you a ton of control, it is definitely more work. Also, at large print sizes, small gaps can appear in the star streaks from the small gaps between exposures.

Some Tips

• You can include the polar axis (rotational center) in your shot by including Polaris (the North star) in your photo (see the Tahoe photo at the top of this post)
• Shoot during a new moon or smaller than half phase if possible
• Look up local moon rise/moon set times so the rising moon doesn’t mess you up in the middle of an exposure
• If you have a large budget, look at battery grips and/or external power sources for your camera such as Quantum’s Turbo 2×2 battery

Timelapses

If you took a bunch of stacking photos, you can always put them together as a time lapse like this:

That’s it for now, feel free to comment or contact me with any questions.