// March 25th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Life, Parker, Photography, Technology, Video
I tried hard to come up with a cool, catchy title, and that was all I could muster. Hopefully the content will make up for the lameness. With Parker on the way, we knew we had to transform one of our extra bedrooms into the baby room, and would consolidate the guest bedroom and office into one room. I, of course, couldn’t do this the normal way, and wanted to do my best to document the transformation of the room.
First, I was a little late getting started. I had moved the guest bed out by the time I decided to start this endeavor, so that was never captured. My first thought was to shoot time lapse video using a video camera. The problem with that is that the work being done on the room was going to take place over quite a long period of time. I also wanted to be able to control when the camera was capturing, so I wouldn’t record tons of dead time. My final solution came in the form of a still camera. Christina and I own 2 cameras. My beloved Canon Digital Rebel XT and our trusty Canon S1IS, the camera we got as a Christmas present the year we got married. We had thought the S1IS had disappeared for over a year, only for it to show up (under the seat of Christina’s car) after we had replaced it. So it had been relegated to be the backup camera, the camera to take to the beach when on vacation, etc… Being a Canon, I was able to install software on my iMac to control it remotely via USB. I was even able to capture the images directly on the computer.
In order to mount the camera, I used a shelf bracket, the head from an old tripod, and some screws from the garage. I wanted maximum room coverage, so I put it in the corner by the door. I also needed continuous power so I wouldn’t have to keep taking it down to change batteries and then guess at the correct replacement of the camera, causing tons of movement in the final video.
After getting the camera up and taking a few pics with the iMac, I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy with the focal length. The shot was not near wide enough. I could only see maybe half of the room. I knew I had an old, cheap video wide angle adapter, so I fished it out of the garage gear stash and worked on a way to attach it to the S1IS. I ended up using the cheapest, easiest, and most universal method to attach it: duct tape.
The biggest problem with this (other than how it looks), is that whenever the camera turns off, it attempts to pull the lens back into the body of the camera. When it can’t do this, it freaks out. I had to untape the wide angle and reboot the camera a couple of times in the setup. The final solution was to always keep the camera on, always keep the USB plugged in, and never turn off the computer. If I broke any of the rules, the setup would be ruined. Once during the renovation the wide angle fell off, so I climbed up on a ladder and retaped it. I can’t really tell in the final video the moment that this happened, which is a good thing. So now, any time that I started working in the room I would set the interval timer shooting mode to shoot every X seconds (15 seconds usually, but sometimes more or less depending on how quick the work I was doing went). I was nearly done with the room when the camera flaked out on me and quit working. Oh well, I’ll post some real pictures of the room with everything else in it later. Here is the final video:
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