OT taking a pic every 10 minutes



E

elyob

Guest
Am thinking of fitting a camera and GPS to my bike for a test and then
taking a picture every 10 minutes (or more often). When home I'd then
make some sort of rubbishy movie. Any suggestions on how to go about
somethiing like this? Most importantly would have to be light. I'm
also going to link to a GPS whether live or via the timestamps later.

I'm guess this is better known as timelapse, but presume this is
mostly done via laptops. I'm hoping not to lug a laptop about for a
seven hour bike ride (battery wouldn't last anyway!).

Also, could get a bullet helmet cam as part of this, which I could use
for vids later....

Thanks for any suggestions!
 
elyob wrote:
> Am thinking of fitting a camera and GPS to my bike for a test and then
> taking a picture every 10 minutes (or more often). When home I'd then
> make some sort of rubbishy movie. Any suggestions on how to go about
> somethiing like this? Most importantly would have to be light. I'm
> also going to link to a GPS whether live or via the timestamps later.
>
> I'm guess this is better known as timelapse, but presume this is
> mostly done via laptops. I'm hoping not to lug a laptop about for a
> seven hour bike ride (battery wouldn't last anyway!).
>
> Also, could get a bullet helmet cam as part of this, which I could use
> for vids later....
>
> Thanks for any suggestions!

I think timelapse photography is more usually thought of as a series of
photographs of a single scene (think of those films of a flower opening
and closing in response to the time of day, or of clouds "hurrying"
across the sky).
 
elyob wrote:
> Am thinking of fitting a camera and GPS to my bike for a test and then
> taking a picture every 10 minutes (or more often). When home I'd then
> make some sort of rubbishy movie. Any suggestions on how to go about
> somethiing like this? Most importantly would have to be light. I'm
> also going to link to a GPS whether live or via the timestamps later.
>
> I'm guess this is better known as timelapse, but presume this is
> mostly done via laptops. I'm hoping not to lug a laptop about for a
> seven hour bike ride (battery wouldn't last anyway!).
>
> Also, could get a bullet helmet cam as part of this, which I could use
> for vids later....
>
> Thanks for any suggestions!


'Timelapse' and 'Slideshow' are very different things. You may need a
complete re-think!

A slideshow is still photos of *highlights* which the viewer appreciates
one at a time. Having photos taken at fixed intervals will be incredibly
boring. Think when you take a set of photos, when you get to look at them
only a few are interesting. Just think what your automatic photos would
look like... Road, Road, Road, Road and van in distance, Road, Road, Road
(just past the ford), road, road, road (with village a blur in the
distance) ...

A timelapse is a series of frames which when put together give a speeded-up
film. To compress 7 hours to say 5 minutes you'd want to take a frame
roughly every 3 seconds. Even here you may want to switch from normal, 5x,
10x and 20x if you're keen to keep the viewer awake by fast-forwarding
through the repetitive bits and slowing for the more interesting bits.

Have a look at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZU_f3-OasY>

One thing, if you're doing timelapse you'll need to find a good way to
stabilize the camera. Putting it on your head /may/ be a good idea /or
possibly/ hard mounted. The problem is the large amount of jitter between
frames.



--
Peter Fox
Beer, dancing, cycling and lots more at www.eminent.demon.co.uk
 
On Feb 27, 5:05 pm, elyob <[email protected]> wrote:
> Am thinking of fitting a camera and GPS to my bike for a test and then
> taking a picture every 10 minutes (or more often). When home I'd then
> make some sort of rubbishy movie. Any suggestions on how to go about
> somethiing like this? Most importantly would have to be light. I'm
> also going to link to a GPS whether live or via the timestamps later.
>
> I'm guess this is better known as timelapse, but presume this is
> mostly done via laptops. I'm hoping not to lug a laptop about for a
> seven hour bike ride (battery wouldn't last anyway!).
>
> Also, could get a bullet helmet cam as part of this, which I could use
> for vids later....
>
> Thanks for any suggestions!

1st thought before looking into the details.. Given that memory is
cheap and all kinds of compression/quality/frame rates are possible -
would the best approach not be to record a normal video from either a
mobile phone or a helmet-cam or your camera?

Unless ofcourse you actually wanted a random set of stills sampled at
a freq of 0.167Hz or something - there's a fair chance you'd miss a
lot good photos and end up with just a few dull ones!

Regards,

Duncan
 
In article <844eef76-651b-449a-b42c-46f3fca38669@
34g2000hsz.googlegroups.com>, elyob
[email protected] says...
> Am thinking of fitting a camera and GPS to my bike for a test and then
> taking a picture every 10 minutes (or more often). When home I'd then
> make some sort of rubbishy movie. Any suggestions on how to go about
> somethiing like this? Most importantly would have to be light. I'm
> also going to link to a GPS whether live or via the timestamps later.
>
> I'm guess this is better known as timelapse, but presume this is
> mostly done via laptops. I'm hoping not to lug a laptop about for a
> seven hour bike ride (battery wouldn't last anyway!).
>
> Also, could get a bullet helmet cam as part of this, which I could use
> for vids later....
>
> Thanks for any suggestions!
>
Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera? You won't
be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway. If you want a
watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one.
 
On Feb 28, 8:18 am, Rob Morley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera?  You won't
> be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway.  If you want a
> watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
> pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one.

Any hand-held (or handlebar-mounted) GPS worth its salt will
automatically record your "tracklog" at intervals from 1pt/sec
upwards, so you don't need to expressly record positions.

You can then download this tracklog to your computer and automatically
match it up with the timestamps from your digital photos - there are a
handful of utilities to do this. Several OpenStreetMap contributors
use this method to record street names without the hassle of writing
them down.

Richard
 
In article <bc894a38-c8ff-4d9f-a17e-98927d77b310@
2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com>, Richard Fairhurst
[email protected] says...
> On Feb 28, 8:18 am, Rob Morley <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera?  You won't
> > be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway.  If you want a
> > watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
> > pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one..
>
> Any hand-held (or handlebar-mounted) GPS worth its salt will
> automatically record your "tracklog" at intervals from 1pt/sec
> upwards, so you don't need to expressly record positions.
>
Don't they have the facility to record at the touch of a button?
 
Rob Morley wrote:

> Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera? You won't
> be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway. If you want a
> watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
> pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one.

This seems the best Idea to me. My Olmpus camera will take time-lapse
pictures at intervals of a set number of minutes. I think that most
Olympus at least will do the same.
I first tried it out to see what our cat (archie) did all day. the
sequence went some thing like;
sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, gone out, sleeping, sleeping, looking out
the window, cleaning, sleeping......
I hope that you manage to get something more interesting than that.
Roger Thorpe
 
> I first tried it out to see what our cat (archie) did all day. the
> sequence went some thing like;
> sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, gone out, sleeping, sleeping, looking out
> the window, cleaning, sleeping......

You should see what they get up to when they don't know they're being
filmed...
 
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Peter Fox wrote:

> One thing, if you're doing timelapse you'll need to find a good way to
> stabilize the camera. Putting it on your head /may/ be a good idea /or
> possibly/ hard mounted. The problem is the large amount of jitter
> between frames.

You can do a certain amount with post-processing, though, at least in
principle. Match subsequent frames up against each other to determine and
thus remove the jitter. I don't think this is even all that difficult to
do, although it could be fairly computationally expensive. Are there
existing tools to do this?

Seems like you can do it, with quite a lot of manual faffing about, in
Avid:

http://www2.softimage.com/ds/tutorials/ds/DS_5_0/TUTORIALS/RemoveJitter/remove_jitter_V5.pdf

tom

--
HI DERE WAHT IS IT MADE
 
In article <[email protected]>, Rob Morley wrote:
>In article <bc894a38-c8ff-4d9f-a17e-98927d77b310@
>2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com>, Richard Fairhurst
>[email protected] says...
>> On Feb 28, 8:18 am, Rob Morley <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera?  You won't
>> > be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway.  If you want a
>> > watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
>> > pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one.
>>
>> Any hand-held (or handlebar-mounted) GPS worth its salt will
>> automatically record your "tracklog" at intervals from 1pt/sec
>> upwards, so you don't need to expressly record positions.
>>
>Don't they have the facility to record at the touch of a button?

Depends on the device, but if you have one that records all the time
to don't have to remember to press a button on that as well as on the
camera. Or you could use a camera with built-in GPS:
http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/01/gps_digital_cam.php
(or a GPS with a builtin camera:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1945433,00.asp)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocod...S_.26_handheld_GPS.2Fdigital_camera_geocoding
 
Alan Braggins <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, Rob Morley wrote:
>>In article <bc894a38-c8ff-4d9f-a17e-98927d77b310@
>>2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com>, Richard Fairhurst
>>[email protected] says...
>>> On Feb 28, 8:18am, Rob Morley <[email protected]> wrote:

>>> > Would it be too obvious to suggest a digital stills camera? You won't
>>> > be able to produce a time-lapse movie effect anyway. If you want a
>>> > watchable slide show you're really going to have to stop and take
>>> > pictures that are worth looking at, and record the GPS data at each one.

>>> Any hand-held (or handlebar-mounted) GPS worth its salt will
>>> automatically record your "tracklog" at intervals from 1pt/sec
>>> upwards, so you don't need to expressly record positions.

>>Don't they have the facility to record at the touch of a button?

> Depends on the device, but if you have one that records all the time
> to don't have to remember to press a button on that as well as on the
> camera. Or you could use a camera with built-in GPS:
> http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/01/gps_digital_cam.php
> (or a GPS with a builtin camera:
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1945433,00.asp)

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocod...S_.26_handheld_GPS.2Fdigital_camera_geocoding

Or since digital photographs are so cheap you could simply photograph
the GPS each time you photographed something else.

--
Chris Malcolm [email protected] DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

K
Nightrider - anyone taking part?
Replies
2
Views
882
UK and Europe
KIDSevents
K
D
Taking the rear wheel off a Brompton?
Replies
8
Views
606
UK and Europe
Gwynne Harper
G
N
Taking advantage of the season of humbug
Replies
6
Views
430
UK and Europe
David Damerell
D
J
More People Taking Cycling Holidays?
Replies
0
Views
386
UK and Europe
[email protected]
J
A
LBS - taking the mick.
Replies
6
Views
255
UK and Europe
Jim Higson
J
Top Bottom Back