The suction cup design is very similar to the Panavise, withe the lever that you flip down to engage the suction. But it has a longer, 8" neck that can be adjusted, and the head is better articulating than most. The neck is really difficult to bend, and I am confident it's not going to change positions or sag over time, etc. (especially when the entire camera weighs only 6oz).
I'm cautiously hopeful that this will work well for the duration of the project, but it's a little scary having the whole thing hinge on such compromises, you know? but when we approached administration with the proposal that would have cost $1500 (DSLR, weatherproof heated/cooled enclosure, solar-powered, the works, totally self-sustaining) they kicked it down without a moment's thought. So we had to go cheap. This whole thing, including the S90, power adapter, eye-fi card, and camera mount, has cost just shy of $300...the bulk of that being because I decided I wanted a wider FOV than the 570IS was giving me and bought the $225 S90 (camera + power adapter). cost could have been under $150 if we'd used my cheap-o camera I bought at first.
I'm still unsure of some settings; I have the camera set with MF right now, which is fine, but it's just in program mode at present. I was thinking I should probably be shooting in aperture priority, but then wasn't sure what aperture to set it at. My first instinct was to go with something like f/8, but then reading on some other forums, they say that can introduce more flicker than if you shoot wide open. Well, wide open is f/2 on this camera, and even at ISO 80, i would think that would just be too wide for daytime shooting. So I may go back and tweak those as I find more information, but in the meantime, it's shooting.
I'm also not sure if I should be shooting in higher resolution than I currently am. Right now I"m using M2 (2,272 x 1,704) which would easily let me crop a 1920x1080 frame out of it, but wonder if I'd get better results by shooting in higher resolution and then letting lightroom scale down the photos. I'm guessing the difference would be miniscule, at best.
The thought of shooting raw mode was rather appealing at first, since we have an essentially endless memory card, but the thought of processing 30,000 raw files sickened me. even at the M2 fine jpg setting, the photos are a little over 1MB each, so I'll be looking at 30GB of photos when the project is done. RAW would be 10x that, easily.
I've got to say I'm really loving this eye-fi card. it's an 8GB card, so using the M2 resolution, it can hold about a month's worth of photos, but I don't even need that, it turns out. I was able to stick an old GX620 PC (it's the model we retired last year so surplus inventory) up in the sound booth, and equip it with wifi in addition to its wired ethernet. It's sitting up there right now, headless (just a tower, power cord, and ethernet connection, no monitor, kb, or mouse, all administration is done remotely) whose sole job it is to download the photos from the eye-fi card via direct-mode wifi after each shot is taken. The folder that those download to is shared out to me in my office, and so I see each photo within a minute of being taken.
Our webadmin is going to write a script that constantly pulls the most recent photo from the folder and displays it on our webpage as a sort of "construction cam" for the PR department. two birds, one stone, i suppose.
Last thing I'm still not sure of is the interval. I'm using 5 minutes right now, but I'm tempted to knock that down to 3 minutes to slow down the biweekly videos a little bit. But that adds a lot to the total photo count in the end, and I'm not sure I want to do that or not.
