Time Lapsed

Hello, Web

Today, I made my first time lapse. Here in my city, the night sky is a starless pink. So it's not a video of the stars seemingly revolving around the Earth. Instead, it's a video of the sky turning from bluish white to a dull pink. I started at 5:05 PM and finished at 7:05.

I started off by setting my Nikon D7100 on my tripod with the 35mm f/1.8 lens. I placed it next to an open window and got a good frame with a little bit of window, a little bit of a tree and a lot of the sky. Next, I set up the interval shooting mode. I chose a frame per minute. 120 frames over 2 hours. However, while choosing the focus field at f/6.3, I left the autofocus on. Furthermore, I forgot to switch off auto ISO too, which capped out at 3200. The last debacle was an accident bump into the tripod, which knocked it off by a few millimeters.

I used a software called Time Lapse Assembler for Mac on my MacBook Pro. It's quite straightforward. You select the source folder (I was shooting JPEGs, by the way), select the encoding (I chose the default h.264), and set the framerate (I went with 24). For dimensions, I chose to resize while keeping the original ratio. However, forgetting that I was shooting in portrait, I chose 1920 pixels for width. There are four quality settings; I chose the 2nd highest.

After around 8 minutes of processing, I had the "small" 50MB .mov video file ready. I'm not sure whether it was worth the 2 and a half hours but I suppose that there has to be a first time for everything.

I look forward to future time lapses that will hopefully yield more favourable results.

Revensburger 18,000 piece 4 Historic World Maps Puzzle

Hello, Internet

Before I purchased the 3,000 piece world map puzzle, I had been hunting for the 18,000 piece 4 Historic World Maps puzzle. The hunt was long but fruitless. Having almost given up all hope, I checked on eBay last year, around March. I found one listing. Opened and slightly damaged box, but unopened bags. I had purchased it within an hour. I started it last year, but had to pack it up due to a lack of space.

This summer, I started it again. After reaching my previous point of progress and crossing it with relative ease, I entered a dry patch on the ocean of the first map. A few weeks ago, I finally pushed through and am now left with just a few hundred pieces of two different shades: cream with dots and golden. I hope to make a final 10 hour push soon and finish it off.

Framed and Hung

5/8/2013

It has been well over a year since I finished the Ravensburger 3,000 piece Historical World Map Puzzle. It has been almost a year since I finished framing it. On the 14th of June, I finished the venture by finally mounting it in my room.

I had another frame made shortly after the framing. The idea was to mount the second frame onto the wall and mount the framed puzzle onto that frame using metal mounting hooks. That, however, was put to halt when I realised that the second frame wasn't aligned.

Mid June, I decided to go ahead with the plan. It took a while to obtain the screws (3 trips to the local hardware store). However, the frame wasn't thick enough and the screws ruptured the wood. I changed the plan to a single bar of wood on the top instead of a whole second frame. A carpenter was working at home and I assigned him the job. Unfortunately, the bar of wood used was rotting and bent. That night, I took two pieces of teak wood and made the wall mount on my own. It was almost perfect (as always). The carpenter fixed that to some extent the next day (14th of June). I also realised that the puzzle frame just wasn't strong enough to be mounted right away. So, I used bars from the second frame to add supports. The carpenter replaced the rusty old screws on the book and added all the modifications. The mason drilled the holes for the mounts and screwed them in with machine threaded metal fittings. The frame hung (almost) perfectly. It's a bit misaligned as compared to the adjoining window frame, but it's just a matter of a degree or two.

Pictures and drawings to follow shortly.

My Hard Drives, My Room(s)

4/8/2013

Today, yet another one of my storage devices died. Thankfully, it was just a 90 Gig SSD. Unfortunately, it was the boot disk on my system. Cut off from my fresh 4.5TB of storage, I was left a bit disconcerted. A little reflection brought me back to my original comparison of data storage to a living environment. I am quite passionate about organisation (and somehow constantly failing at it), especially in my room. I have tried to bring the same to my data, but never quite managed to. I've now realised the reason: I'm a hoarder.

It came up around a week ago. On my way to my uncle's place, my mother recounted tales of my grandmother. One described my grandmother's hoarding habits. While cleaning up my room (after quite a while) and replacing my bedside drawers with a smaller bedside table, I pondered over hoarding. I realised that I am a hoarder. Much of the stuff that I had collected and wrapped was utterly useless. Deciding that it was time for a change, I started picking up objects that I had no foreseeable use for. There were less than 5 items.

In the comfort of the steadiness of my current setup, I had ignored organisation of data. That, along with my hoarding habits over the past few years, has lead to bits spread over various devices, much of it pointless.

My data can be divided into the following categories:

1. Movies: Most of these are ones I would not watch more than ones, many that I won't watch even once. However, I just can't get myself to get rid of any.
2. TV Shows: Since these are episodic, they are the worse to organise. The older seasons are downloaded as a whole, but the new ones are downloaded per episode as each is released. Most of these new ones are left in download folders of old hard drives spread across various devices. Before OS reinstalls, I dump the download folders into backups on various external hard drives. For complete series, seasons are often missing. This leads to a horrible dilemma, especially since TV shows are potentially re-watchable.
3. Games: My collection of games is something I'm quite fond of. But with improving technology, it's becoming a nightmare. Many games are (or used to be) split into archives. If one goes, the whole game goes. ISOs need to be extracted and kept as is. Then are updates and patches. They end up in download folders too, spread all over, never indexed properly. In the past week itself, I've had to re-download at least three games due to patches and bad sectors.
4. Music: This is the easiest to organise in data form, especially since I'm not exactly a downlaoder.
5. Backups: This is where it all leads to. OS reinstalls have become quite frequent due to new releases, hardware updates and failing drives. Each update brings a new backup. Each backup is a new folder in an external drive with movies, TV episodes, random PDFs and downloads, applications and other crap, most of which I'll never need again.

My data is spread across various drives. Many are external, as I've come to repent. Others are big internal drives, which too I'm getting rather dubious of due to the latest developments in my failing hardware. It's like having all my objects of day-to-day use spread in all the rooms of my house. The solution is simple: clean up room by room and throw away the junk. Just the thought of it is so relaxing. But the memory of that which is lost will always haunt me from my stash of crashed drives. Maybe once I have them all replaced...


UPDATE 1: Forgive the badly written post; I was distracted and sleepy. Anyway, I have had my redemption. Today, I pulled out my bag of shame: a polythene bag filled with broken hard drives. I picked out three: my Seagate 500GB Momentus XT that crashed a few months ago (not much data there), a WD 1TB My Passport Essentials that died due to a popular hardware issue last month, taking with it around 400GB of backup and games, and the gem, a 2009 WD 320GB My Passport Studio. I registered each of them and the result was fulfilling: the first two were safely in warranty; the third had 10 DAYS of warranty left. I immediately filed for replacement. God bless RMA.

UPDATE 2: Well, I tried the Momentus XT in my PC and it worked. That will work as my primary drive. Also, Corsair responded that my SSD was out of warranty. I got a new 1TB My Passport Essentials and a 320GB WD Elements. I guess that's the best they would give me. I'm satisfied. The new drives are lying around and my data is in no better state. Lethargy has bested me once more.

Bedsheets Repost and Post Processing

30/5/2013

Hello again, World

New camera, new experiments, old photos. That doesn't really works out. Well, anyway, I shot some new photos of my bedsheets. The tripod really helps.

After that, I tried manual post processing of photos. This was something new for me, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit that. But wow. The results were astounding. Having a 2.66GHz dual core processor and a dedicated graphics chip working the pixels instead of a small little image processor in a handheld camera really adds to it. Noise Reduction! It is the holy grail of low-light imaging. And the different effects that can be added. White balance on your fingertips. Lens profile, which automatically corrects distortion and vignetting. Exposure compensation. What not?

Anyway, the results are below.

Why do we Record at 25FPS or 30FPS

30/5/2013

Hello, World

It's been almost a month since my brother returned from the USA with tons of new stuff for me. One of the most exciting of the goodies was a new camera - the Nikon D7100. Along with it came a 10-24mm f/3.5-45 lens.

Anyway, fast forward to yesterday. I was prepping to record a video at my music school for a band performance. I had spent the previous night researching video recording. Shutter speed in an open sensor digital video recording system? What the hell. That's when I learned about the rotating shutter mechanism, which explained a question I had asked myself years ago but never bothered to find the answer to: who did the film reel camcorders work? The rotating shutter blocked the reel between frame switching. I still haven't grasped the whole concept yet, though. My main confusion is on the matter of how the reel moves. From the movies and videos I have seen, the reel rotates continuously. However, in the case of a rotating shutter, the motion of the film has to be jittered, pausing between shutter "releases". I guess that's a mystery for another night, or another experience.

But I digress. Back to the topic at hand, I had, thanks to my recently-acquired knowledge, shifted from 720p60 to 1080p30. I had managed to get the ISO all the way down to 1600 from 6400 in the limited light. This was in part due to the application of the recent awareness, and partly thanks to the new white, 23w CFL lamps in the room, which replaced the dim, yellow, most-likely-6W CFLs. Well, the quality was quite smooth. There was just the right amount of motion blur with a 360° shutter. There was little noise and the sharpness was adequate. However, there was a new issue: there was a weird horizontal flickering when viewed on the big screen. I tried adjusting the shutter speed as well as the ISO, but that didn't help. Finally, I tried switching off the tube light. Still futile. I resolved to work the issue out at home.

That brings us to my research half an hour ago. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't surprised by the mention of "PAL" and "NTSC" in video frame rates. Analog signals. What perplexed me was the rationalisation of the flickering on the analog region. How could the geological location of a digital camera cause flickering in the video and require one to change the frame rate of the video? Well, I went with it and tested it out on my own. And viola, no flicker at 25 and 50 FPS. Furthermore, particular shutter speeds at 30 FPS (1/50 and 1/100 to be specific) removed the flicker too. After that, it was just physics and general knowledge.

Alternating Current! That was the cause. In PAL countries, the frequency of the A/C current is 50Hz. In NTSC countries, it is 60Hz. I guess that is the origin of the specific analog signals. Due to the sinusoidal alternating nature of the current, our lights flicker at 50Hz. With a frame rate of 30 or 60 FPS, the dimming is caught in certain frames, causing horizontal flickering glitches. A workaround is to use the aforementioned particular shutter speeds.

Sometimes I forget how much there is still to learn in this world. Yet, times like this serve as constant reminders. But for now, that's that. I'm going to be recording tomorrow at 1080p25 and a lower ISO than previously considered. I can even consider a 180° shutter, but I suppose that would be pushing it.

Goodnight

Framed and to be Hung

24/11/2012

Almost a year has passed since I pushed in the last piece of the 3,000 piece Old World Map puzzle into place. And a few months have gone by since I first asked my father to have a frame built for the puzzle. Well, yesterday, the task was finally accomplished. The first milestone was having the frame assembled. The second was to return the frame, which was 20cm short in length and have it extended. The third milestone was to get the finished frame back and realise that the puzzle just doesn't fit. An hour and a half it took, to find the correct orientation of the ply board, the puzzle and the fibre glass, after which I finally had the frame on. Then I got down to nailing it shut, which was easier said that done. Over 25 nails required. Finally, with the sweat of victory sweetening my armpits, I raised the framed puzzle and leaned it against the crockery shelf. It was a sight to admire. Unfortunately, it's too heavy to be hung by conventional means, so I have to wait for a bracket to be made.

And as always, pictures below.

Glow in the Dark Bedsheets

Hello, World

I took some time out to get a better photograph of my glow-in-the-dark bedsheets. The sheets are pretty awesome. Nothing beats lying down over dimly glowing butterflies and flowers before closing my physical eyes and opening those of my mind.

Anyway, the photography wasn't easy. I tried a smaller aperture to keep everything in focus, seeing that I was shooting at a distance ranging from a single foot to 7 feet, and lower ISO to reduce noise, but I gave on that after a 2 minute 30 second exposure resulted in a blank. My second attempt with the largest aperture (f/3.5 at 18mm) and 1600 ISO fetched better results in 30 seconds, but then my 6 year old 1GB Kingston CF Card finally gave way. Not working. The card reader shows blank. The camera says that the card is not usable. So I fetched my father's old digital camera (one of the first Canon Digital Ixus cameras) and removed the 32MB Samsung card. My D70s listed 9 available exposures. I setup the camera again, tried a few shots on aperture priority to check the depth of field (nothing good there) and the frame. And then off went the lights, the routers and access points and the screen of my laptop. 30 seconds in the darkness later I had a brand new shot, waiting for you below.

Later.

P.S: The little white light on the top right corner is from my HDD. Apparently a handkerchief wasn't enough to get rid of it all in a 30 second exposure.