Archive for the ‘camera’ Category

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Underwater Housing remote trigger and Data Transfer…

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

This is something I’ve been working on for a few months now, and it’s finally working. My aim was to have a camera underwater and to be able to trigger it with the PocketWizards and to be able to retrieve the data instantaneously.

SETUP :
Aquatech DV4-III, FishEye port
Canon 1D MK3 and Fish Eye
Some homemade cables
Pocketwizard
Laptop

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The data transfer is by far the hardest part of this build. The transfer rates are not too fast with L-JPG taking 8 seconds each and RAW files taking 15 seconds each, but if you are just shooting bursts (Start and finishes) then this is fine.

The first real test will be the National Age Group Swimming with Sporting Images in a few weeks. I have to get the approval of the pool manager and then hope the coaches don’t get too upset by it and we’re a go’er.

Fingers Crossed.

Posted in camera, gear, geek, Pocket Wizard, remote, Sport, swimming, Tech, technology | No Comments »

Calibrating Canon Long Lenses….

Friday, January 1st, 2010

As with any new camera, I try to calibrate the lenses I use to make sure they are doing what the camera thinks. With shorter lenses I use the Lens Align Pro which works extremely well.


This product does not work so well from say 200mm and longer. The resolution of the camera and the minimum focal distance make it inoperable. So I decided to make my own long lens calibrations system.

Using the new Mark IV, I first wanted to test the 400 and 1.4 I would be using at the cricket next week. As with the MK III I needed to back the focus back quite a bit to get the FOD sharp. At 10 meters, f4, 560mm (400 X 1.4) the DOF is 0.060229 m (9.969976 m to 10.030205 m), so 6 centimetres. The width of the test cards is 6 centimetres. The sharpest image was with +15 far on the camera.

From here I changes to the 400mm by itself. The DOF for this is even shorter with 4 centimetres to play with. I needed to back this off to the maximum +20 FAR on the camera to get it close.

I might talk to Canon to see if they can factory calibrate the lens a bit better. Sure it’s old, but the may be able to tweak it closer for me.

Posted in calibration, camera, geek, lens, Tech, technology | No Comments »

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