Stefan blogs IT

DIY Canon AC-Adapter

I’m a big fan of time-lapse projects. But there always are 2 limitations. Memory Card space and Battery life. The memory card space is easy to overcome. Connect your DSLR with laptop/pc/mac and store the images there, or buy a bigger memory card. 16GB can go a long way with medium-sized JPG’s. Battery life is the main problem in my eyes. Using a Battery grip, 2 Canon batteries only go for about 6-10h. Setting the review-time to 0s can save a load of battery power, but it still doesn’t extend the battery life long enough.
I have tried putting 6 Eneloop AA batteries in the grip. This babies kept the camera running for about 25hours. A serious improvement, and great for mobile time-lapses.

I wanted to be able to plug my camera in a power outlet, so it could virtually run forever. Canon has such an AC-Adapter. The ACK-DC20. But at a price of £76 I had no intention of buying it. In stead, I built one myself with things I had in my ‘storage’ and spent less than 2euro. From scratch you’d be able to build this for about 15-20eur.

You will need:

• A 12V AC-DC adapter with an output power of 1 Ampere (1000mA)
• An old Canon battery
• Some soldering equipment
• A piece of PCB
• wires
• An LM7808
• Two 1ouF 16V Capacitors
• A female adapter-plug

This ‘tutorial’ will guide you building the AC-Adapter for a Canon 400D, but since all canon’s have the same 7.4V batteries this will work with any other Canon DSLR and probably any other brand of DSLR.

Step 1: The battery

The first thing you have to do is open up an old Canon battery. I had a few old ones laying around which couldn’t keep a decent charge. Cut the battery open along the lines. Be careful that you don’t cut too deep into the battery inside. start with the corners and gently cut deeper till it opens.
You’ll have something like this:

Take the batteries out and cut them from the separator. Keep the separator containing the metal plates. We’ll need that upon assembly.

Step 2: The scheme

The soldering is fairly straightforward. I am using an LM7808 Voltage regulator. This chip keeps a constant DC voltage between 7.9 and 8.1V. This is perfect for the camera as it can take up to 8.1V as you can see in the Image. The green circle highlights the cable-gutter on the camera.

This voltage regulator costs less than 1 Euro and can power up to 2Amps, The camera doesn’t use more than 1Amp so it doesn’t need any cooling.

Pin layout of the LM7808:

The schematics:

As you can see it’s fairly straightforward. The 12V gets connected to the IN pin. 1 capacitor is placed between the IN and GND for ripple-deduction which might come from the adapter. Another capacitor is placed between the OUT and GND for a stable voltage. This is not mandatory but I did it anyway.

Step 3: The soldering

1: Solder the female adapter-plug onto a piece of wire. This can be a short or long wire, as you please. The female plug you see on the right.

2: Take a small piece of PCB which will fit inside the battery shell and solder the LM7808 voltage regulator onto it so it can lay flat.

3: solder the capacitors (optional but recommended) following the scheme. These capacitors are polarised. the short leg needs to be connected to the GND, the longer leg to the +12V and +8V for the next one. Don’t get this the wrong way or they will explode and/or catch fire!

4: Finally solder 2 short wires onto the PCB to connect the output (+8V) and Ground (GND) to the battery separator and solder the long wires to the IN line of the LM7808 and the ground wire to the GND pin. In an adapter, the +12V usually comes from the middle pin. the outer ring is usually the ground. Be sure to check this. Below you can see my print layout. The separator will be in the middle, so place the components on the outsides.

5: Check if it’s working properly. Check the input and output voltages. Make sure you have no short-circuits.

6: Fit everything inside the small battery case

7: Cut a small hole in the battery box’s side top for the cable to come out. Look where the cable gutter in your DSLR is and make it fit.

8: Glue to box close.

9: All done!

Step 4: The adapter

As I said the adapter should have an output current of 1000mA or more. A 12V adapter is recommended, but it can be anything from 11V up to 20V (although 12V is the best choice here). You probably have one of those babies laying around the house. Using a higher voltage adapter will make the LM7808 become warm or hot when under full load. I’ve tested full load (continuous shooting in Medium JPG for 1 minute) and the battery case had come skin-warm but far from hot!

The result

As you see the cable fits perfectly in the camera and the battery grip. Both options work perfectly. The lid closes on both without any problems.

All in all this is a fairly straight-forward build which costs you about 2EUR if you don’t have to buy a 12V Adapter.

Let me know what you think or have any questions

Wide Angle is Cool… (Part 2)

… if you use it correctly. In my previous blogpost I promised to tell you what wide angle lenses are good for. As you might remember I have the sigma 10-20mm lens.

So the first genre of photos where wide angle can be ‘cool’ is pretty well known: Portraits!

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

These portraits are of course not the ones you will make of a CEO. But among friends these are pretty awesome. Animal portraits work also well.

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Lets be honest. You wont be making this kind portraits all the time. The next use of wide angle is one which is more common for me. Churches. Churches are usually high and long, which makes it very difficult to get them in 1 frame. I love 10mm for the great FOV it gives me.

Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm

This amazing church could have never given this result without wide angle. The great thing about 10mm is the FOV gets wider, so the church looks much longer. Gives a great perspective.

Another example:

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Warning! When making pictures of churches inside (and this actually counts for all buildings) you have to pay attention that you are exactly in the middle. If you aren’t in the middle of the building, the ‘distortion’ (because of the wide angle) will be not even. If you look at the image above, the benches are straight, the ceiling is straight, and the side walls are leaning to the front. Because this picture was made in the center, the distortion is even between both sides. If you will make the same picture not from the center, the distortion will become uneven and your shot will be pretty worthless.

Wide angle works very nice for buildings.but you should be very careful for distortion. The great thing about wide angle is the fact that you do not need to be far away to get the whole building in the frame.

Sigma 10-20mm @ 12mm

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

This last image is a perfect example of ‘frame the whole building from up close’. There were still constructions going on, and there was a 2m high fence around it. I was standing by the fence, keeping the cam above it. I was standing about 10m from the building.

My last use for wide angle is… Panorama shots! *Wait!? In your last blog post you were telling they were not good for panorama!?!?* Yes. I did say that. And it still is true. But a wide angle is awesome in 1 kind of panorama. In my last blogpost I told you get way to much sky in wide angle shots. So when the sky IS the item you want to photograph, wide angle is an awesome solution!

Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm

Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Sunsets in city or beach are great in wide angle. I especially love the natural vignetting you get on wide angle. the sun lights the sky most where it went down, so because of the wide angle you get this vignette effect.

Let me know if you know some more great uses for wide angle which I did not cover. Personally I think I’ve got them all. I hope this was an interesting read.

Drops

A few weeks ago I had some fun experimenting with water and a strobism setup. And I finally found the time to upload them.

The above shots were made with a flash (+ 1/2 CTB filter) right under the glass bowl and a flash next to the bowl (+ 1/4 CTB filter) to light the background.

In the end I removed the color filters and did some experiments with colored drops.

Setup:

Click on the image to view the setup with explanation.

View the complete 19 image large set on flickr

All the images that I made are without any post-processing. Just raw from the camera.

Wide Angle is Cool…

… must be what a lot of photographers think. I thought the exact same thing. And I still believe that. But my idea of its purpose has changed. Mind you I am talking about wide angle lenses. Fish eye lenses are not in this group. (Yeah OK, they are wide, but I am talking about undistorted wide angles)

About 6 months ago I bought myself the Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6. As a beginning photographer I wanted to have the whole range covered. from 10mm till 300mm. The Sigma 10-20 is an EF-S lens, so it works only on Canon Crop bodies. If we make the calculations for full frame that would be an 16-32 lens.

Anyway. I bought that lens with the idea that 10mm (16mm on FF) will be great for Panorama Shots. Well, think again. 10mm ain’t great for panorama shots. Don’t get me wrong here. I like this lens. It’s a great lens. And 10mm is great in some occasions. But not at all for a panorama. I could write 1 million words why it ain’t good for panorama shots. But instead I’ll show you some shots which I made with some extra words of explanation.

Panorama of Kaunas. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @20mm

There you have it. This panorama shot was made on the roof of a church. It is not an artistic shot. I didn’t do any post-processing. But it gives a clear idea of how the view was. In the center of the image you can see the White Dome.

Panorama of Kaunas. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @12mm

The same panorama shot @ 12mm. Lets be honest. this looks horrible. The part of sky in the image increased, which is not a problem. But you can see a lot more of the buildings which are really up close. That is the problem. A wide angle lens gives you a very wide view horizontally (that is what we want) but also vertically. And we don’t need that. This implies that all buildings seem to be very far away. Can you still spot the White dome in the center? If you can you will see that all detail in the panorama is lost. Yeah, OK, you can see the buildings which are up close quite good. But everything which is a little bit further (and in a panoramic view, that will be the case in pretty much all of the occasions) lost complete detail.

The next example:

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @20mm

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @10mm

Pretty much the same story. Only here it is a lot worse. Again these shots did not have any post processing. Comparing both shots, the percentage of sky has been doubled. The amount of grass is a little bit less, because i didn’t want that my feet would be visible in the frame. The view over the city has doubled in width. But all detail is lost in the 10mm shot. I see a lot of grass and sky, a few tower buildings and that’s it.

Panorama of Vilnius. Shot with the Sigma 10-20mm @10mm and cropped

The only way to make this image ‘OK’ is by cropping it. I roughly cropped 70% away! Now it looks OK, but not great because the detail in the image is lost. This is a low-res panoramic shot. My Canon has a 10MP sensor. Cropping 70% away leaves me a 3MP panoramic shot. In my opinion panoramic shots should be with a decent resolution. And there is only 1 way to do that. Make a series of pictures on a tripod, preferably with a lens of about 50mm, and stitch it in Photoshop.

Conclusion: Do not buy a wide-angle lens for panoramic shots. Unless you are satisfied with low-res quick and easy panoramic shots, Use Photoshop and a series of shots to make a nice panorama. Panoramic shots below 17mm look too wide, and lose a lot of detail. Most kit lenses have a range of 18-50mm. 17-18mm works just fine for panoramas. If you want wider. Photoshop is the way to go.

In my next blog post I will talk about the better uses of a wide angle lens.

Lockpicker to the Resque

Today I have quite a story. I was driving Gintare her sister’s car to pick Gintare up from the center. Gintare met with Doville who had my business cards. So they were waiting in the center on the side of the road. I parked and jumped out the car, and started to chat. And that is when the trouble started. I always let my car keys on the car when I am just standing next to it. And I am not used driving this car. This Ford Focus closes automatically after 2 minutes. So the car keys got locked in the car. Good thing there are such things as spare keys. The only problem was that Gintare’s sister had the spare keys, and she is now in Rome….

On rear window of the car was a security label with a telephone number. Gintare called that number and we had to call back in 10 minutes. So we called again and the man on the phone would arrange something. He called us back and told that he sent someone who’ll be there in 20 minutes. And 20 minutes later a silver, dirty, BMW without any prints stopped and came to the resque. He took a fine piece of flexible metal bar out of the trunk and asked us kindly to step away from the car and not to look at him. Only 20 seconds later the door was open. This guy was good! It did cost us 100LTL which is around 30 euros. But if we’d call him directly it would’ve been 50LTL, that’s only 15euros… The funny thing is that he did not check if we were the owners of the car. In the end all was good. It only took about 45 minutes from getting the keys locked in the car to driving off to the center.

Bloody Ear

A week ago my father descided to sell one of our sheep. He knew a turkish person living a few streets from here, which wanted to buy the sheep.

So far so good. Today was sheep-D-Day. The person came to pick up the sheep with a brand new van, payed, and went. He told he will bring back the rope later. 15 minutes later the turkish man was back, with a small bag. Inside the bag was the rope and the registration number (like so). But the registration number was still in the ear! So he cutted the ear and just gave it to us with the rope…

I knew he bought the sheep to kill and eat, but this was just a lil sick…

Batch Extracting RAR packages recursively

Ever had a download consisting of multiple rarred parts? I guess  you have. Nowadays everything is packed in winrar. Extracting something in winrar is very easy. Just right click -> extract here. but what if you have ALOT of RAR files? what if these RAR files are split? Then you need hours of waiting and clicking to keep everything nicely in its original folder.

I was tired of this one day. So i came up with the idea to write a script that will do it for me.

I wrote a VB script, which is controlling winrar.

The code:

Dim objFSO
Dim ofolder
Dim objStream
Dim folder

Set objFSO = CreateObject("scripting.filesystemobject")

folder = InputBox("Enter folder to unpack","UnRarer", "E:\Series\")

CheckFolder (objFSO.getfolder(folder))

MsgBox "File Search Completed."

Sub CheckFolder(objCurrentFolder)

    Dim strTemp
    Dim strSearch
    Dim strOutput
    Dim objNewFolder
    Dim objFile
    Dim objStream

    strSearch = ".rar"

       For Each objFile In objCurrentFolder.Files
           strTemp = Right(objFile.Name, 4)
                If UCase(strTemp) = UCase(strSearch) Then
                    'Got one
                        Dim rar
                        rar = objCurrentFolder.Path & "\" & objFile.Name
                        'MsgBox rar

            Dim oShell
            Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WSCript.shell")
            Return = oShell.run ("""F:\Program Files\WinRAR\unrar.exe"" e -o- """ & rar & """ """ & objCurrentFolder.Path & """", 1, true)
            Set oShell = Nothing
        End If
       Next

       'Recurse through all of the folders
       For Each objNewFolder In objCurrentFolder.subFolders
               CheckFolder objNewFolder
       Next

End Sub

A small explantion of how it works: first we declare the objects which we will use and we ask what the folder is in which we will be looking for RAR files. Next we call the function which will search recursively for all RAR files. Basically the function looks for all files in the folder, and checks if their extension is .rar . If there is a RAR file found, a shell (windows CMD) will open and start a command that winrar understands. This command extracts the package. If the file already exists (when it was extracted before) the script will NOT overwrite the original file but just skip this package. When the extraction is finished, it will look for more rars. If there aren’t any, then it will check the subfolders for any RAR files.

This simple script will save you alot of time. You can copy the code in Notepad and save it as rarextractor.vbs or you can download it here.

please leave a comment if you found this post usefull

Tomorrow is the day

Tomorrow is the day! After 25 days of being alone, i will finally meet her again, my love, mano gintaryte. I will fly to lithuania for a short time, only from sunday evening till thursday very early in the morning, so 3 full days. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time and it wasn’t easy, but i’m ready and counting the hours now. The last few days were very silly, since she couldnt recieve my sms’es anymore and she can’t send messages to me too, something wrong with her operator i guess. I hope everything will go well to get there. i’ll write when i get back

New life, new blog

This is the new blog I created. In this blog i will write about my life and IT. Things I am working on, things that happen, …

If you came here for my Erasmus blog: http://erasmus.blog.stefanvds.com