Fast motion candle (camera control)
Sunday, January 21st, 2007
I’m still alive, although it’s been 5 months since my last post. 
I’ve been busy with university and work the last couple of months, so there hasn’t been much time for Ogre or other projects lately.
Anyway, just for the fun of it, I recently bought Olympus SDK to play with controlling my (rather old) C-5060WZ from the PC. It’s not the best piece of software I’ve seen, but it wasn’t that expensive either and seems to work just fine. It allows you to control much of the camera’s functions programmatically from the PC, i.e. setting focal length and lots of other settings, capturing pictures, and downloading/managing picture files etc.
Inspired by BBC’s Planet Earth, where they show e.g. plants growing in fast motion, I hacked together a small application capturing a picture of a small candle every 15 seconds. You can see a video of the result by clicking on the picture to the right of this text. The 33 seconds of video are made from 264 pictures taken during a period of about 1½ hour. Then there was no more space left on the CF card in the camera. Next time I’ll have to delete the pictures after having downloaded them - and find a more interesting scene.
