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Using MD script to capture animals at night

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Offline fudgey

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #10 on: 14 / August / 2008, 06:58:45 »
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Quote from: ewavr on 14 / August / 2008, 06:24:15
This works in live view mode, but with exposure with 1s and more camera can not detect quickly moving animals.

Cool, I'll have to experiment with that one day. Of course it's only good using very long compare intervals (in excess of exposure time I suppose), but it would be better than not being able to detect anything at all... animals and people do move slowly enough, sometimes :D.
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Offline fishpepper

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #11 on: 14 / August / 2008, 13:36:28 »
Hi!

I was thinking of doing the same with my ixus.
My idea was to use the focussing help led:
- enable the led (maybe not setting the full brightness, might get to warm ?)
- use normal motion detection
- enable flash

I think this should work. I think many animals won't care about the dim red light.
Maybe you can set the brightness of the led to a very low value.
I haven't tried it yet because i dont have a waterproof casing for outside yet.

But be careful! I don't know if the led is made for beeing on such a long time!!!
So this might damage/destroy the led. The led itself is just mounted on a thin plastic pcb (ixus 40).
Maybe the heat produced by the led is not absorbed fast enough.
But i have no idea if they really use a high power led that needs cooling or not.
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Offline fudgey

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #12 on: 14 / August / 2008, 14:51:37 »
Quote from: fishpepper on 14 / August / 2008, 13:36:28
I was thinking of doing the same with my ixus.
My idea was to use the focussing help led:
- enable the led (maybe not setting the full brightness, might get to warm ?)
- use normal motion detection
- enable flash

Don't know about ixus, but for my a570is the focus lamp is always enabled during half shoot if flash is enabled (or something like that, see MDFB documentation, I think I wrote about it there), even without CHDK. And fast react MD always runs under half shoot.

Of course, bugs may cause your camera to crash (irritatingly but presumably safely) when using MD with flash. I'm not sure if the recent bug fix will alter this behavior as well, of if it affects your model.
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Offline fishpepper

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #13 on: 14 / August / 2008, 15:39:16 »
Ah cool! On my ixus40 the light stays on if flash is in redeye mode.
Before I thought about setting it to on with the led command in the script after focus...
But this was just an idea, i didn't test it yet.

Anyway for the ixus40 md with flash crashes just sometimes while starting/the first picture.
No idea why but it only happens in some rare cases. I did several shots of falling waterdrops
with md and shutter override :)
Once md is running with flash enabled it keeps running (at least on my ixus40)

Just tested it with md and flash forced to redeye: it works :) If something moves into the red beam it takes the picture :)
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Offline reyalp

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #14 on: 14 / August / 2008, 16:29:47 »
fishpepper: This discussion may be relevant Bug Reports against Recent Builds  --  Report bugs here to the crashes.
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Offline rylangrayston

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #15 on: 14 / September / 2008, 14:24:16 »
If you wanted to take a close up pic of something it would be best if the shutter opened while the subject was centered in the pic.

To accomplish this with motion detection you could use  a laser pointer

If you dimmed the pointer you could shine it directly into the camera lens. Then subject would shade the beam
setting off the motion detect and your subject would be in the position you chose! ( talk about hitting 3 birds with one stone!)

Be sure to dim the pointer as it could damage the image sensor ( use a variable resistor)



 
« Last Edit: 14 / September / 2008, 14:31:11 by rylangrayston »
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Offline fudgey

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Re: Using MD script to capture animals at night
« Reply #16 on: 14 / September / 2008, 14:48:36 »
A laser pointer is probably inferior to a regular flashlight... MD can only monitor a few pixels here and there efficiently, so it's better to have a light source that's as large as possible while still getting masked by the animal. A laser minimizes the spot size, making MD less reliable. Any small light source will appear sufficiently small when it's far enough.
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