Photos

I started taken pictures when I was in secondary school. My first camera was a Agfamatic. This was followed by a Voigtlaender camera. For my confirmation I got a Nikon FM and later bought a Minox 35. The first digital camera I bought was a Nikon 775. It still exists and is well. This was replaced by a Nikon 5400, which is a brilliant camera. The latest equipment is a Nikon D80. In addition there is a compact Lumix TZ20 which is useful when travelling light. And of course there are the cameras that are and have been various mobile phones. The latest addition is the PiEye.

I am using the hugin software to create rather large panoramic photos. You can find my pictures on
Fickr and Google Plus.

Timelapse Videos

I also take videos mostly of the family but also of other activities for instance my cycling. I have made timelapse videos with a Veho VCC-003 Muvi Micro DV Camcorder strapped to my handlebar. The camera works best in good light and given its size the results are pretty good in my opinion. The size has the disadvantage that the camera is difficult to find at times. The most annoying feature is that you can’t film and charge the camera at the same time, which means that you can film at most the length of the battery life (a few hours depending on the temperature) and then you have to wait until the battery is recharged.

In the past I have used ‘deshaker’ to stabilize and improve the videos and used various editing software to cut the video. More recently I discovered this simple toolchain:

Extract still images ffmpeg -i ../2012-04-23-a4-home-01.AVI -r 2 image-%06d.png the -r option determines the number of frames. If you have more than one film create a directory for each film.
Delete unwanted frames
Move files into one directory (this assumes there are two directories called frames01frames02 and the frames end up renamed to something like frames01-image00023.png in the frames directory
```
for dir in frames01 frames02
do
cd $dir
for file in *.png
do
mv $file ../frames/$dir-$file
done
cd ..
done
```
Renumber, ffmpeg needs the files to be numbered in consecutive order without gaps. This script renames the files in frames to 000001.png 000002.png etc.
```
#!/bin/bash
i=1
for file in *.png
do
j=$( printf "%06d" "$i" )
mv "$file" "image-$j.png"
(( i++ ))
done
```
Make the time-lapse video:
ffmpeg -f image2 -i image-%06d.png -r 24 -vcodec libtheora -vb 4096k -acodec null test.ogv
Upload the the film to youtube. By clicking around find the editor page with the special effects, there is a button called 'stabilise' that processes the film. Then save it, and send URLs to your friends. You can admire my masterpieces on YouTube.