Photography

Hacking a webcam for long exposure astrophotography

I finally got around to hacking a Philips SPC 900 to enable it to take long exposure images suitable for astrophotography. The modifications are fairly well known. The approach I took is a mixture of the http://www.boltonastro.org.uk/Members%5FArea/Projects/spc880conversion.pdf from Bolton Astronomical Society and http://www.yesyes.info/index.php/diy/philips-spc900-webcam-lx-and-ampoff-mod/ .

The circuit between both approaches is roughly the same, I followed the circuit in the former. The modification allows the camera to be switched to a long exposure mode via a switch. The switch can be triggered over a serial port, so I added a USB to serial adaptor and a USB hub (both from ebay) to the unit to allow control from a computer and have just one cable coming from the unit. Read more

By albertw,

Indoor torch photography

Recently I bought a 5 million candle power torch for photography. The intention was to use it to ‘paint’ nighttime photos. However today I thought I’d try it out to light a boquet of flowers.     This shot was taken of a single rose in a pint glass. In order to get the dark background you just need to have a distant background and ensure that the torch is only lighting the target. The Read more

By albertw,

So if you’ve any money go up to the park

Last Saturday I took my first trip to Dublin Zoo in several years, and its improved vastly from my last visit. The animals have much more room to roam about than they had on my previous visits, and work is continuing to improve facilities further. A Zoo provides great photo opportunities. One of my favourite pictures of the day was of an animal that I hadn’t seen before, a Red Panda. This photo is almost Read more

By albertw,