Todays project uses both sides of a lampshade to make an image that changes when you turn the light on. Spooky! Move your mouse over the image to see what happens!
Note: If you don’t see a change, the second image is here. Also, please let me know- I’d like to hear if this isn’t a good solution for rollover images.
Rollover code from 700i Webmaster Tips.
We had our 9th meeting on October 28th. Both presenters gave excellent talks, and I had a great time. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera so I don’t have any pictures.
It counts as a thing-a-day because I helped organize it and brought the snacks 
.
I spent most of the day recovering from a cold, but managed to get this board assembled and tested today.
This is the Bare Bones Board from Modern Devices.
To make a stop motion video from a set of images: (Make a backup of them first!)
mogrify -resize 640x480 *.JPG mencoder -ovc lavc -mf w=640:h=480:fps=20:type=jpg 'mf://*.JPG' -o time_lapse-test.flv
Note: If the frames also need to be rotated, run them through mogrify with the -rotate option first. I had to do this twice before it had an effect, presumably because the rotate flag was set in the jpeg headers.
What could be better than having a little instrument with you all the time, hidden in your hat?
Insiders Tip: Don’t take this to the airport.
The inspiration for this project came while on the long road trip to Austin last weekend, and I finally had some time to make it. The prototype is a bit rough, but I think it gets the point across well enough. Walkthrough of the project and schematic after the break.
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Note: October was a horrible choice for a thing-a-day project, what with the Maker Faire and all. I’ll get 31 projects in by re-starting today.
Sick of getting an ugly, harsh light when you take pictures using a flash? Tired of relying on finding a white ceiling to use for bounce flash? Then you need a diffuser for your flash! I followed these nice directions from Chuck Gardner to work with my external flash, but you can find similar projects that work quite nicely with your built-in flash as well.
Why is this useful? The flash is a very small light, so it comes off as a hard light source when mounted to the top of a camera. By bouncing the light off of a larger diffuser, it effectively becomes a bigger and less directional light source, which softens shadows and evens out the lighting from the flash. At least, that is how I understand it. Tutorial after the break.
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I remember reading in some book about how to make a giant kaleidoscope out of cardboard and tinfoil, but since mirrors are pretty cheap, I just used those instead. Now I really want to watch some Busby Berkeley films…
I’m still working on the second part of the intervalometer (translation: putting it off until I figure out a more intelligent way to make the menus), but here is a video I made to prove that the concept works:
Note: The quality is pretty poor on the youtube version; I recommend the higher resolution version.