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Category Archives: Photography

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Fun with photos for blog posts

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on January 11, 2019 by PolyWoggJanuary 11, 2019  

No, I’m not starting a Sheldon Cooper “Fun with flags” videocast rip-off. 🙂 I’m taking a Metaliteracy class, and of course it has a strong sub-element on being a good digital citizen, particularly when it comes to online content. Namely, not stealing it willy-nilly but instead respecting licensing.

One thing I don’t do a whole lot of in my blog is include photos. Every advice site on the ‘net will tell you that pix are where it’s at, and if you want your text to soar, add pictures. So, sure, if I’m writing about something that I have pictures of that I took, I usually include them. But if I’m just writing in general, maybe about publishing or reading, I don’t see why a picture of a book or a typewriter is going to help that prose. One of my favorite blogs, The Passive Voice, also doesn’t use much in the way of graphics, yet frequently shares links to sites that allow you to do simple photos for blogs etc. on the cheap and easy.

Take for instance the site PhotoFunia.com. It basically allows you to upload a photo you already have and do a bunch of fun things with it. You can upload a photo, and put it in a newspaper layout with a headline of your choice. You can add a pic or some text to a building being blown up. A billboard. A xmas card. A pic of a painter painting a picture and it will weave your photo into the canvas. Some things work well, some dont’, but the examples on their site are awesome. Here’s an image of one where the photo and a drawing are merged:

Cool site to play with. Of course, you can do all of it in apps/programs like Adobe’s products, but why bother if you can do it quickly with a template?

Okay, so maybe you like things like PhotoShop or Lightroom. But you don’t have the cash. What can you do? Well, instead of pirating it, you could try DarkTable, billed as an opensource (i.e. free) alternative. It’s great for simple things like adjusting lighting and a thousand other things, but it was way too complicated to pick up quickly. But I probably don’t have to…

A site called Unsplash has free images for use, and many of them are even available for commercial use if need be. People, landscape, buildings…lots of choices. Not as big as some of the stock image sites, but these ones are free. One of the things I often “test” when I’m looking at a site is whether or not they have photos of frogs and what kinds. Simple or full-on tree frogs. It’s what I want for PolyWogg from time to time, so it’s a “real” test. Unsplash has a bunch for frog (maybe 50 or so) which isn’t bad, and while none of them are OMG AWESOME, they’re certainly usable for a blog post if I want something. For those doing an article about a city, you’re likely to find well-known landmarks easily. But, like I said, I often “test” it by looking for frogs.

Pixabay is another similar site, but it has Shutterstock as its sponsor, and often intersperses payment-required photos into the search results. And they’re always SO much better. But for free, I searched for frog, and it gave me 100 pics on the first page with 45 more pages in the wings. You would probably want to narrow the search a bit. 🙂 In my case, I liked this one:

The last one on my free sites is Pexels. Same drill as the rest, although it has links to Adobe Stock as its sponsor, and not as many images as the previous one. But searching for frog, I get this:

That’s probably one of the better ones I’ve seen for free around the net. And free with permission is far better than ripping off photographers by stealing their photos from around the net.


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Henry’s Photo 101 course – Week 1 – Camera Fundamentals

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on December 9, 2018 by PolyWoggDecember 9, 2018  

I mentioned in one of my #50by50 posts (#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course) that I was taking the Photo 101 course that Henry’s offers, and that I wanted to blog about the actual classes each week. Unfortunately, life intervened and I didn’t get to blogging each week, and the company has also altered their offerings to put more of it online or have one-day workshops than to offer in-person classes over several weeks. Nevertheless, I wanted to blog about it, so here I go.

Week 1 was about camera fundamentals, and if I called it “meet your camera week”, it would be a bit more direct. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands-on instruction to walk various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with in the class. Overall for the week, there were six basic areas to cover.

A. DIAL MODES

One of the first things we talked about was that the goal of the course was to give people a lot more confidence to get off of automatic mode and into more manual settings. As such, we started with the obvious — how do you get out of automatic mode?

For different cameras, the dial has slightly different words and letters, but generally you switch the dial from automatic mode (a green A usually) to one of four main manual modes — Program Mode (you change a couple of things, the rest is automatic), S or Tv is shutter priority mode (you set the shutter speed and it figures the rest out), A or Av is aperture priority mode (you set aperture, it figures the rest out) or M for manual mode where you set and control everything.

Nothing particularly surprising in there, but I have the Canon model so it has the Tv and Av labels. Why? Av stands for “aperture value”, which seems understandable. And so Tv is shutter priority…wait, what? The abbreviation is for “time value”, i.e. how long a shutter time you are using. I think Nikon uses A and S, but no biggie, we all adjusted. I was surprised no one asked why it was called Tv, but I figured I was the only one who didn’t know, so I didn’t ask either. I should mention in passing that I was in a group of 10 people as it becomes a bit relevant for week 3 and 4.

B. DISABLE LIGHT STABILIZATION

One thing we did change early on to get everyone to the same spot was to turn off the auto light stabilizer — this stops the camera from overriding your settings and guessing how much light you want in your pics. After all, the whole point of going to manual modes was to have a lot more control. So we turned it off by going to Program Mode (P), pressing Menu, choosing CAMERA 2 as the tab, and turning off AUTO LIGHT STABILIZER.

C. HEY, LOOK, A VIEWFINDER!

Next on the list of things to learn more about was the viewfinder on the camera. Sure, lots of us have smartphones and we want to default to using the little digital display to line things up, but the viewfinder gives you a much better understanding of compositional elements (week 4), and it’s good to get into the habit of using it now. And if you can turn off the screen, your battery will last longer anyway. Just saying.

Anyway, there were two aspects of the viewfinder that were emphasized, and I confess I didn’t know either one. First, while I knew there were little numbers showing up in the viewfinder display, I didn’t know what they were. Across the bottom is usually exposure compensation (week 2) in the middle, key settings for aperture or shutter (bottom left), plus a few other handy things to know. Quite small print, but they’re there. If you press the shutter button down half-way, they appear.

The second thing is that while the camera does the autofocus thing for the actual image in the lens, you can also adjust the viewfinder for YOUR eyes. There is a small dial next to the viewfinder that is a diopter that allows you to adjust the viewfinder focus (not the camera lens, just the viewfinder) to your vision. Some people take their glasses off and adjust it to their prescription; others tweak it slightly to their viewing eye.

D. ISO SETTINGS

I’d love to tell you that it stands for something like “image sensitivity ordering” as that would seem to make some kind of sense, but it really goes back to the International Standards Organization. Yep, it has nothing to do with photography. It was the international way to measure and compare the light sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. In old film cameras, it often was referred to as film speed or the ASA rating. Generally, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the camera is to light. Why does it matter?

In photography, imaging, even just plain seeing, you only get a picture or see things by light reflecting off objects and coming into your eye or camera. In order for the camera to “capture” the image, it has to be able to see gradations of light and distinguish between light and dark. People often refer to it as “capturing the light”.

When you’re using your camera, you can tell it how much light you want to capture. If you set it to AUTO ISO, it is a general, all-purpose setting where the camera will figure out how much light that it is seeing coming in, and it will adjust higher if it isn’t getting that much light. In other words, if you have a lot of light, it will set it for ISO 100. If you have only a little light, it will make itself “more” sensitive to the little light there is by adjusting to ISO 6400, for example.

Outside in the daytime or even bright artificial light, and if you’re out of AUTO ISO mode, you will likely set it somewhere between 100-400 ISO. This works well if you’re just using your camera in hand-held mode, or if slightly lower light, with a tripod. But here’s the catch…the more sensitive your setting, the more sensitive the camera is to any change in light, including IF YOU MOVE THE CAMERA. So, generally, the more you up the ISO setting, the more you want to increase stabilization and use a tripod.

If you are in a low-light situation, you might want to go for 800-3200.

If you are in a REALLY low-light situation, you could go to 6400 (the limit on my camera) or more (some go up to 20K+).

Now you might think, “okay, you adjust it just for level of light”. And that’s a good rule of thumb. But that is too simplistic. Cameras always work at capturing light as a trade-off between three things — light sensitivity, how long your shutter is open, and how wide the opening is aka aperture. If you boost light sensitivity, you get more light; if you leave your shutter open longer, you get more light; if you have a really big opening (wide aperture), you get more light. If you do all three, you get a white image with no details.

So, suppose you are outside, it’s a bright sunny day, and you want to take a picture of your cousin out waterskiing. Now, because you know that it’s an object in motion, you need a really fast shutter speed — take a quick pic, freeze the motion, and move on. But the faster the shutter speed, the LESS light the camera is letting in. And if you open the aperture really wide, it’s going to take longer to snap the pic, likely resulting in blurring. So, to compensate for the fast shutter speed, the wise photographer can boost the light sensitivity. Basically saying, “Okay, I need a super fast shutter to open just wide enough to get the shot, and then close really quickly, which will allow me to ‘freeze’ motion, and since that won’t give me much light in that short of time, I’m going to boost the image sensitivity way up.”

I took the following photo a few years ago in a preset scene mode for sports, which at the time, I didn’t really know what the camera was doing, but now I can go back and figure out what it did (actually, this is one of the learning methods in the class — find a photo that we like that we took previously in auto mode, and go back to figure out what the settings were that worked and why). The camera had given me a fast shutter speed of 1/1600th of a second. It kept my aperture fairly open at F5.6, partly as I was zoomed in, and it changed my default bright day setting of about ISO 100 to ISO 400.

Now I was also taking high-res images, maximum pixels, and if it had been a cloudy day, the camera might have bumped me up to ISO 800 or more. Indoors, fast action sports like basketball, the camera would likely go up to ISO 1600 or maybe even 6400. But because the camera was adjusting on the fly to my “fast” settings, and greater light sensitivity, I was able to get this one.

Other reasons to increase light sensitivity is if you MUST get a particular shot, i.e. if you miss it, it’s gone, as it increases likelihood of capturing something. Sports shots are often like that, get it now or it’s gone, but there are other times too.

E. AUTO-FOCUS

My Canon Rebel T5i / 700D was considered to be, at the time that I bought it, a high-value entry-level DSLR, and many newbies love it out of the box as the stock lenses all come with powered auto-focus. In fact, most users may never ever take the lens off auto-focus mode. However, we learned that auto-focus needs three factors to be at play:

  1. AT LEAST MINIMUM DISTANCE: Lenses all have different minimum focus distances. Macro lenses will let you get up close and personal with a flower or bug, but most lenses won’t. A standard lens wants to be back a few feet from your subject. So if you’re closer than that, it can’t auto-focus. You may struggle to get it to focus even manually, but that’s a somewhat separate issue.
  2. CONTRAST: If you are wearing light colours, like white, against a flat white wall, the camera is going to have trouble figuring out distances. There’s no contrast between you and the wall to tell it that you’re closer and to focus on you. The easiest contrast, most often, is that something is overlapping something else. Your eyes do the same thing. You see a telephone pole off in the distance and a car over to the side. You may not be able to visually tell which one is closer immediately but if you can see wires leading up to the pole, and roadway leading up to the car, you can intellectually guess which one is closer. However, if the car passes in front of the pole, you can immediately tell which is closer, both intellectually and visually. Cameras have limited reasoning ability…they want to see something darker/brighter in front of something lighter (and thus farther away), and if there is a strong contrast between the two, the sensors can pick up the difference almost “visually” rather than “computationally”. If it can’t, it’s going to struggle with any sort of auto-focus. You may even see it struggle as it focuses in and then out, in and then out.
  3. STILL OR SLOW-MOVING. If the object goes by like the Roadrunner, your camera is going to say, “Umm, what was that?” Because it was moving too fast to focus on it. It couldn’t keep up with focusing, kind of like where it is now, getting ready to take the shot, boom, it’s moved and the focus is off now, refocus, ready to snap, dammit, where did that roadrunner go?

However, while auto-focus is good generally, there is also a propensity to have multi-points of focus and semi-continuous auto-focus. If you instead set it to a single point of focus (a red dot in the middle, for example), you can focus on whatever you want at any distance with a half-press of the shutter and “lock in” that distance. Then, you can move your camera to wherever you want to centre it.

Why would this be useful? The example in the book is looking through some trees at someone who is on a dock to the left. If you focus in the centre, it will focus on the trees and leaves which are about half the distance to the person. Auto-focus will lock there by default, and the person will be blurred. Instead, if you turn your camera and point it at the person, get it in focus for them, pressing half-way down to “lock that distance”, you can then rotate the camera so the trees and leaves are back in the centre, and take the shot. The camera is still focusing on the person (locked to that distance) but the composition will be the trees in the foreground slightly out of focus and the person sharp. You often see this in wedding photos where people are walking through the woods and they are razor sharp at a medium distance but not necessarily centred in the shot. A much easier example to understand is using it focus on something in the distance if you’re at a zoo to “lock the distance” and then turning so you’re shooting through the fence. If you auto-focus normally, it will focus on the fence; if you focus on the distance, the fence more or less fades away.

F. MANUAL PICTURE BRIGHTNESS

But we learned that sometimes you don’t want to adjust ISO because it will mess up other things. How do you brighten a shot without a flash? There is something called manual picture brightness or EV for exposure value. It’s an extra setting that allows you to do +/- increments from 0.0 being neutral. Mine lets me go up and down in 0.3 increments, up to +5 and down to -5. My smartphone does +/- 2 in .5 increments, although most people using their apps have NO idea what the EV does. If you increase EV, your pic is brighter; decrease EV, it goes darker. It just gives you a little more control without messing with the other settings. It is apparently particularly good for difficult lighting like snow (DSLRs often dull it so boost an extra EV nudge) or in low light generally (DSLRs often over-brighten it so reduce it an extra EV nudge or two).

And that was the end of the first week’s class. If I had to say what I got out of the class, I would say:

  1. More comfort with manual and the dial modes;
  2. How to control the viewfinder, and even that there was a diopter control;
  3. The link between ISO and shutter speed for sports shots i.e. how I got the shot I did of the cousin water-skiing;
  4. How to “lock” focus at one distance and then compose; and,
  5. How to adjust picture brightness with the exposure value.

In class, we took some pics to practice, mostly playing with things at different distances to get things in focus and then with manually enhancing and reducing exposure values (or over-adjusting in these cases).

Close focus on teacher:

Farther focus on TV:

Boosted the EV:

Decreased the EV:

A good first week…and then we had homework. Yes, homework! Mostly just to replicate some of the practice in the classroom.

A relatively “normal setting” photo:

EV reduced:

EV enhanced:

Close focus, far object blurred:

Far focus, close subject:


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#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on October 10, 2018 by PolyWoggDecember 10, 2018  

Back in 2016, I decided to “up my game” for photography, and I thought I would start with a class or two. Henry’s courses are popular, but there are also courses through the city’s annual learning catalog, and even through Algonquin College if I want to get really serious. But I wanted to keep it simple, so I started watching The Great Course’s “Fundamentals of Photography” series (Fundamentals of Photography – Class 01 – Making Great Pictures).

Recently, as part of my lingering 50by50 commitments, I wanted to get back into photography learning, but even in the last two years, my approach has changed. I have a decent camera — a Canon Rebel T5i aka the 700D — and it works well for me. It is considered a high-value entry level DSLR, but my needs are relatively modest, with just a couple of quirks.

My primary need is outdoors photography … waterfalls, landscapes, flora and fauna, hiking through nature, and friends and family doing both active and passive activities.

My secondary need, like most people, is indoor photography … birthdays, parties, events, holidays.

My quirky needs are both related to astrophotography — first, attached to the scope (body only) or second, straight Milky Way sky shots (with and without zooms).

The T5i came in a couple of configured bundles, and I went with the one that included two lenses — 18-55mm, and 55-250mm. It also has a whack of pre-set modes:

  • Portrait (blurred backgrounds);
  • Landscape (wide depth of field so both foreground and background are in focus);
  • Close-up (aka a software macro option for flowers and things);
  • Sports (continuous shooting, high speed capture, rapid focus);
  • Scene mode (several sub-options);
  • Creative auto (simple mode for quick setting of common features);
  • Flash off (can’t fire, no matter what the camera thinks is right or not); and,
  • Scene-intelligent auto (the computer takes its best guess on all the settings, useful if you keep changing setting)

It then has four semi-manual modes:

  • Program mode (P) — This is a bit misleading, as it is semi-auto (aperture and shutter speed) but you control the rest;
  • Shutter priority mode (Tv) — You control how fast the shutter is, the computer does the rest;
  • Aperture priority mode (Av) — You control how wide the aperture is, the computer does the rest;
  • Manual mode (M) — The full power of the camera is at your fingertips.

For me, I spend almost all my time in pre-set modes, and truth be told, I don’t even do that well.

I have managed to get what I think are some great shots — birds in flight, cousins doing various water sports, flora around various hiking trails in Ottawa. But while I pointed the camera, chose the mode (sports, for example) and captured the shot (cousin waterskiing and spraying up water), I didn’t really know what the camera was doing. I wanted to know how and why it worked, not just the what of the shot or settings. Part of my reasoning is that if I can understand the basics for my primary needs (basic outdoors and indoors), I have a better shot at understanding how to approach astrophotography.

So I signed up in September for a course with Henry’s, the local photography store. I wanted a bit of hands-on experience to get me out of pre-set modes and into manual, but I also wanted to know what the camera was doing. Part of that experience is going back to look at previous photos that turned out well and figuring out, “OH! So THAT’S how I / my camera did that…”. There were a few options available including both “learn about your Canon camera” as well as “photography 101”. With timing and location, I opted for the photography basics course in Kanata.

The course was divided into four classroom sessions, plus one practical session, with each session designed to dive into the key aspects of what you control in photography. I’m going to write separate blog posts about each week, but the overview is show below, although the titles/descriptions are mine, not the official ones:

  1. Camera fundamentals — I hesitate to call this “meet your camera” but it pretty much is what it was about. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands on walking various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with.
  2. Understanding aperture — Looking at depth of field, aperture and f/stops, and fast lenses.
  3. Understanding shutter speed — Looking at motion for capture, blurring, and panning techniques;
  4. Planning the photo — Looking at a combination of different lenses, perspectives, sensors, and then the creative side (composition, tips).

It was an interesting experience. For week 1 and 2, I went to the Kanata course on Wednesday nights, and there were about 10 of us in the class. A wide range of interest — older for hobby, younger with dreams of entrepreneurship, a few unique interests. However, the instructor noted he was also teaching on Friday nights nearer my house (earlier time, and on a Friday?), and if we missed Wed, we could catch Friday at the other site. Week 3 & 4, I did just that, because there was only 1 person over there, meaning it was almost like a hands-on class. We asked questions constantly, at least I did, and stopped him regularly when something wasn’t clear. Way more “aha” moments than if we had been in a larger group because it was the follow-up questions that really crystallized things for me. When I do the four blogs for the weeks, I really want to see if I can re-create some of the examples.

I have the practical session tonight, but it isn’t as “practical” as it sounds — we’ll be over by a park in the relative dark. The Friday night class would be great for me, but it’s at a bad time for me this week. so not sure what I’m doing yet.

Am I ready to go full manual now? No, but I achieved my true goal — learning and feeling much more comfortable with making my camera do more of what I want it to and less of what I don’t. Part of a multi-year plan to get me fully conversant before retirement. And a welcome addition to my list of 50 things.

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A quick way to understand the basic steps in smartphone astrophotography

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on August 10, 2018 by PolyWoggAugust 10, 2018  

I’ve posted a few times about my experience with smartphone astrophotography. A person who is active online in this area, Kevin Francis, shared with me a copy of an infographic he did based on his experiences.

You can find the infographic over at:

Smartphone Astrophotography: In 6 Steps [Infographic]

Note that the infographic isn`t meant to give you all the details, but I like his framing:

  1. Choosing your equipment (i.e., pick a smartphone);
  2. Choose a camera app (there are only really two great ones, depends on which OS you`re running);
  3. Use a tripod or mount to make it steady;
  4. Decide if you`re using the phone by itself, marrying it to a lens, or shooting through a telescope;
  5. Capture the image (single shots, long or short exposures, multiple images for stacking, etc.);
  6. Process the images you took.

Is that level of detail going to get you going today? No, but it will tell you the basics you need to know so you can start thinking about what you want to do. Thanks to Kevin for sharing…

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Smartphone astrophotography part 9 – DSOs through a long exposure in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018  

Earlier I mentioned that when you’re doing your initial camera settings, you could see how good your hardware was by looking at the maximum resolution of long exposures. If it crunches it to a much smaller size than your max resolution for normal shots, you’re kind of hosed for astrophotography. Like me.

But, sure, you can go into program mode. Max out your ISO, boost your duration to 10s or longer (too long and in theory you’ll get star trails), and BAM, a long exposure shot.

Here’s what I get when I set my camera for 10s @ ISO 1600 while looking at M003:

Isn’t that amazing? The depth, the colour, it feels like I could just touch it. A solid black image of nothingness. My sensor will pick up bright single stars (like Spica or something), but it will NOT register a DSO. Most of the time, it won’t even TAKE a picture — it basically gives an error that no picture was recorded. It saw NOTHING, so it took NOTHING. Apparently somewhere in the above there was enough of something for the camera to think there was something there, but nothing visible once processed. It’s also not entirely clear on my old phone if it is doing anything other than simulating a long exposure.

But regardless of what it does or doesn’t do for LEs, it does mean I’m limited to shots of planets or the moon. Maybe some constellations if the individual stars are bright enough. If I want to do more, I need a new camera to work with…

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Smartphone astrophotography part 8 – Video in Camera FV-5 / Cinema FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018  

If you don’t have very good control over your manual settings, or you can’t get a lot of images to stack, one solution that a lot of people use is to say “screw it” and just take a video. Usually the power of the camera drops somewhat by going to video, but what you lack in initial power, you make up for when you take a video. For the ISO comparison, I shot the moon. Some of the manual controls in Camera FV-5 were overriding each other, but still, one way around a lot of short burst images is to do a video. Since Camera FV-5 doesn’t support video directly, I used the companion app, Cinema FV-5.

I shot one of the moon for 90s, and then ran it through the PIPP processor plus Auto-Stakkert. Here is the result, compared with the original single shot earlier:

Single shot Video processed and stacked

Obviously, something went wrong in the stacking process somewhere, which is part of the challenge of using videos — you have to convert them essentially into frames and then stack them one on top of another to get an image. More art than science at times, and I didn’t go back to find the problem, partly as I’m lazy and partly as it is a bit overkill for a moon shot when the original has a fair amount of detail. If you want more than that, use a real camera!

I also did one of Jupiter for 80s, same processing:

No better than I had done earlier, although the relatively perfect roundness of the planet hints at the power of stacking if you can capture one in the first place that isn’t washed out.

And one of Spica, a single star, for 10s, same processing:

Not very exciting, but it can be done. Normally it would be done with larger fields, but well, my camera doesn’t do that. This is about the best I can get.

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Smartphone astrophotography part 7 – ISO control in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018  

For any good astrophotography, you need to get out of automatic mode and into more granular manual control. On my old camera, I hit a limit even on ISO control and duration of photos, so even showing ISO elements for the moon isn’t quite so obvious. The app compensates to some extent for the duration to still give me a decent shot, so while you don’t necessarily see the images getting completely washed out with ISO settings, you can see that you start to lose detail (as the app compensates) for the mountain range Montes Penninus about halfway up on the left and the crater collection on the bottom.

ISO – Auto

ISO – 100

ISO – 200

ISO – 400

ISO – 800

ISO -1600

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Smartphone astrophotography part 6 – Intervalometer in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 28, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018  

One nice feature that some people might like in the Camera FV-5 app is a built-in intervalometer. The setting is available from the Shooting Utilities menu on the main screen (looks like a histogram / landscape image of a mountain), and within that menu, is located as the second icon from the right (next to BRK). The symbol looks like the timer icon, but says INT in small letters under it.

The shooting modes available let you choose:

a. Interval + total shots i.e. how often to take a pic and how many photos in total;

b. Interval + shooting duration;

c. Interval+ playback duration i.e. if you turn it into a GIF or video;

d. Shooting + playback duration i.e. if you want to essentially later create slow motion or compressed video;

e. Shooting duration + total number of shots i.e. it will figure out how often to take pics.

For AP, you’re likely to stay in the first one…how far apart to take the shots (likely low number of 1 or 2 seconds) and how many photos in total (100+ is common). Your maximum number of shots is theoretically unlimited (it let me put in 10M shots for instance), but going much above several thousand is going to suck your battery dry and eat up your memory. The interval range is between 1 and 3600 seconds (1s up to 1h).

I ran 100 shots through, but for some reason, the app set my shots on Jupiter at ISO 1000 again, basically guaranteeing overwhelming whiteout of the planet. Stacking that 100 times doesn’t really help with that, just makes it worse in many ways. The app just didn’t give me enough control to bypass that on first go.

Here’s the result, compliments of AutoStakkert:

Nothing special there. But at least Camera FV-5 has the function, something a lot of other apps don’t, and a key tool that most astro photographers need. Saves having to press the button 100 times too. 🙂

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Smartphone astrophotography part 5 – Colour channels in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 28, 2018  

Most of the people doing AP tend to say, use the RGB colour channels. Some go hard-core and sample different colour channels separately to give more definition in certain colour ranges, and if you were an expert, you also might want to turn on the visual histogram with each photo. More power to you, if you do.

For me, I am persuaded in part by the idea that shades of gray are not the same as shades of colour, and I would rather have RGB in the mix to make what I get in the image as close as possible to what I see with my eye in some respects. But I thought I would try and see if maybe it would do something on the white balance or other settings. The first is with RGB, the second is “luminance” aka B/W.

RGB Luminance (B/W)

Hard to tell at the washed out levels, but I would tend to go with the first all the time. If you were into the DSLR or high-end webcams, you’d have a more nuanced view, no doubt, but RGB it is for me.

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Smartphone astrophotography part 4 – White balance in Camera FV-5

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on May 25, 2018 by PolyWoggMay 25, 2018  

There is a lot of conflicting information out there about white balance and what it should be for a setting. Some say set it to daylight mode, as it generally avoids colour challenges where things shift and don’t look right. Makes sense. Another site said however that if I was shooting in an urban setting, I should go for a “colder” setting. I wanted to test it, and the computer over-rode the settings for some reason. My end result looks identical to me:

Supposedly cloudy setting:

Supposedly daylight setting:

Supposedly flourescent / tungsten:

Supposedly incandescent (the coldest setting):

In the end, I can only go by the screen as the outputs don’t tend to help much on this setting. Overall, basically, I would say that the daylight setting is indeed the most realistic. Anything else on the moon either dulled it out (which could be good), or changed the colour (think light blue for tungsten). I just wish I had a better image to show the difference. However, with some of the other limitations, I suspect you may end up using AUTO WB more often than not for within the solar system.

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