DIY

We are now an official SCYO dolly distributor - Timelapse equipment from South Africa

Submitted by andre on Sun, 06/08/2014 - 00:17

ElysiaVisuals is now an official SCYO - Timelapse SA distributor. Their SCYO (Create Your Own Dolly) is an extremely versatile dolly that can be fitted with DC motors or with stepper motors. You can use the MX2, MX3 or our own RamperPro controller to control this dolly. The RamperPro can be extended with a stepper motor controller from ElysiaVisuals to make it all happen. This gives you an extremely strong dolly combined with the most versatile camera time lapse controller on the market.

nanoMoco connector board

Submitted by andre on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 13:11
nanoMoco break out board

Today I received these PCB's in the post. I designed these myself. That was a difficult road since I had never done this before. Electronics is a hobby of mine, but designing and producing my own boards was always something that I tried to prevent. In the end it wasn't that hard. The board is designed with Eagle, a software package that is free to use for small non commercial boards. The boards were produced in China. The only drawback of that is that you have to wait six weeks before you get your results back.

Fly by Wire - a Nikon exposure ramping test

Submitted by andre on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 13:08

I gave an elaborate explanation about timelaps exposure ramping in my last blog called Bulb ramping with a Nikon dSLR - The technical story. I am very interested in exposure ramping timelapse photography. These are movies where you for example see a sunset while the exposure of the movie stays more or less the same. My previous blog describes a solution for a problem that Nikon camera's have when you use them for this complex technique. I now have developed a device that can be used to automatically exposure ramp timelapse movies. The ISO of the camera, shutter speed and in the very near future the aperture of the camera will be automatically set by my timelapse controller.

Bulb ramping with a Nikon dSLR - The technical story

Submitted by andre on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 13:06

I hate it when Canon users say that a Nikon is not capable of something. Well there is one thing that Canon camera's do better. Exposure ramping or bulb ramping. Imagine you want to create a time lapse movie of a sunset. Normally you would do that with a fixed shutter speed. But then your movie will become darker and darker when the sun sets. Wouldn't it be great if you can make the shutter speed longer after each frame? Then the day will go into the night and the night will have the same exposure. This is where bulb ramping comes in.

MicroEngine for studio time lapse photography

Submitted by andre on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 13:00
Elysia Visuals MicroEngine

Ok, I promised some hardware projects that I would publish on my blog. This is certainly photography related, but a bit technical for most of you I guess. The first piece of hardware is my studio time lapse photography engine. More projects will follow, but not all of them will be open source, open hardware like the MicroEngine. The software that I have written for the device is open source under the GPL license.