Mike’s Blog

TimeLapse London from mikehellers on Vimeo.

The above Video is a collection of timelapse videos done over the last few months in London.
I have used a number of different cameras to take the pictures: Canon G9 with CHDK, Canon 500D and Canon 7D with external intervalometer. After converting the individual images into timelapse Videos using Quicktime 7 Pro, some further work has been done in Final Cut Pro. The scenes at Trafalgar Square have been treated using the Long Time Exposure Plugin from CHV to create a blending effect. Some of the other clips include some panning done in Final Cut, while other have just been scaled down to HD resolution.
The soundtrack is a composition of Denny Schneidemesser called ‘Savanna Speedrun’ released under a creative commons licence.

Photos and Video captured using a Canon 7D.
Music: Denny Schneidemesser – Heart of the Winter

Sign used by ” The Donkey Breed Society” during the 2010 New Years Parade in London.

As I already mentioned in the last post, there were a number of very nice presentation at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin over the past days.
Here is another great one. If you are interested in enterprise network security this one is a must. I can guarantee that you will learn more then one thing while watching this, and it is actually rather funny at the same time. Brilliant.

Fabian Yamaguchi is the speaker, and he is an excellent speaker. Some might remember him from the presentation he did last year about TCP based Denial of Service attacks.
During this years presentation, nicely called “cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/fuckups“, he tells you the story of an attack by making use of so far undisclosed but subtle bugs.

And again, for the ease of viewing, I have added a (low quality) Flash version of the presentation below, but you can of course also download the video at the 26c3 website. Enjoy.

UPDATE: A good quality MP4 version is now also available for download on the 26C3 website. Download it here.

UPDATE: A good quality MP4 version of teh video is now also available for download on the 26C3 website. Download it here.

Over the last days, the annual CCC congress (Chaos Computer Club) (26th Chaos Communication Congress) happened in Berlin. As every year, it is an event that should not be missed.
Most of the presentations have been streamed live.

Most of the topics were in one way or the other linked to privacy and technology. This was not different for the presentation from Axel Schmidt, titled “Das Recht am eigenen Bild und das Ende der “Street Photography”

During the first half of the presentation he is covering the day to day live of a press photographer, while the second half focuses more on the issues of Street photography. Certainly an interesting topic.
You can download a capture of the Live stream on a number of sites, but to make it easier, I created a flash version of the capture and added it below for the ease of viewing.

The presentation is done in German.

Captured at the Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park, London

Fun Fair at Leicester Square, London.

Captured using a Canon 500D on a cold but clear evening early november 2009. Exposure time was 30s.

While going through some rather old backups, I stumbled across a folder from 1996. At the time I was student at the Institut Superieur de Technologie in Luxembourg. One of the projects we worked on at the time was to create a navigable QuicktimeVR movie. We chose to take the Library as scenery for the QTVR movie.
We used an Apple QuickTake digital camera to take the pictures, which is one of the reasons for the rather low resolution images. But performance of the computers at the time was certainly also part of it, after all, this little gem is now over 13 years old.
The final project included a clickable map of the room, done using Macromedia Director if I remember correctly, but I don’t seem to have a copy of that part anymore.

The first clip was a test taking in one of the studios, while the second one was the final result and you can click through the clip to “walk” through the not so impressive library.

Over the last weeks I have played around with a different robotic camera head. The reason is the ongoing issue with the Gigapan Epic to hold heavier cameras. I really want to be able to use the Canon 500D with a heavy lens to take gigapixel panoramas, and my combination clearly reaches the limit of what is possible with the Gigapan Epic. Hopefully the new SLR version of the Gigapan will solve this issue. Anyway, in the meantime I was reading a lot about alternative systems. One of them is based on the Merlin mount, which is not really designed to be used for this purpose, but it is designed to hold and motorize astronomic telescopes. The interesting feature is that it can hold up to 4kg and is actually rather cheap. (I paid £159 for the Merlin including tripod).
There is a very active group of users and developers on the AutoPano forums. The outcome is a fantastic software called PapyWizard which allows you to control the Merlin mount and use it for gigapixel panoramas. The only additional missing part is a Serial to bluetooth adapter to allow wireless communication between the software and the mount. The software is available for the Nokia Tablet series (N770, N800, N810) but also for Linux, MacOSX and Windows. I am using a Nokia N810, which I bought very cheap on Ebay.

Below is a picture of my current setup, showing the Merlin including the Canon 500D with a Zoom lens.

Merlin astronomic mount

I am still sorting out some of the issues with this setup. I do miss some features of the Gigapan, but since the Papywizard is actively being developed, more features are being added on a regular basis. Overall it is an interesting alternative. But since it isn’t an all/in/one solution, I wouldn’t really recommend it to newcomers at this point in time.

Anyway, below is one of the first test panoramas I took using the Merlin. There are a number of issues in the picture, but overall it isn’t that bad.

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