nanoMoco connector 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.

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Zeeland bridge time lapse - First NanoMoco field test

This is the first test I did with my dolly that is converted to the NanoMoco electronics. The sequence was taken at one of the most popular dive sites here in the Netherlands. My "old" electronics consisted of an Arduino, a custom made shield to control the camera and a stepper motor controller. I am currently beta testing the new OpenMoco NanoMoco board. This is a small 1.5 " x 1/5 " electronics board that holds everything you need. The boards holds an AVR micro controller, a stepper motor controller, electronics to control your camera and an RS-485 chip.

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Third field test of my time-lapse dolly - Watersnood monument Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel

Here is the third field test of my time lapse dolly. I am finally getting a grip with this machine. This short video is not perfect yet, but I am close. I unfortunately made some miscalculations while setting up my rig. That resulted in an 8 seconds sequences which was a bit short for this test. This is the first test where I put a subject really close to my camera. I used a 14mm lens for this sequence. The movement of the dolly is smooth, but will be better next time.

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Focus Stacking Experiment - Using the time lapse dolly to automatically shoot sequences

Digital photography has brought us many multi shot techniques like focus stacking and HDRI. This story is about Focus Stacking, this is a technique that we can use to get a much larger depth of field than we normally get with digital camera's. The most well known is HDRI or High Dynamic Range Imaging. That is a technique that we can use to greatly enlarge the dynamic range of a digital camera. That is necessary because digital camera's do not offer us enough dynamic range in many natural conditions.

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Second field test of my time-lapse dolly - The brienenoordbrug in Rotterdam

Here is the result of my second field test of the OpenMoco time lapse dolly. The dolly performs very well. It is reaching a resolution of 300.000 steps over 2 meters. This means I can move the dolly 0.006 millimeters between shots. That should be enough I would think.

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First field test of my time-lapse dolly

I just returned from my very first field test of my OpenMoco based time-lapse dolly. The dolly worked great and gave me no big issues at all. I might have to change the points where the rail is put on the two tripods, but that is only 10 minutes of work. Just more holes to drill and more wire to tap. This sequence was shot in RAW with a Nikon D700 and a Nikon 14-24 lens. I have used this combination before for time-lapse photography. I find it really annoying that I see a lot of flicker in the beginning of the sequence. I normally don't have that with this lens.

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OpenMoco based timelapse dolly - first prototype

This is the first blog about a series that I will write about motion controlled time-lapse photography. I was extremely inspired by the Life series by the BBC and especially by the tracking time-lapse clip that was partly shot in a forest and in a studio. I decided that I want to create professional time-lapse movies myself. This has inspired me to create my own time-lapse controller, the MicroEngine. I have written about this engine before on my blog. You need a lot of stuff when you want to create processional time-lapse movies. This can be very expensive. I decided to build my own time-lapse hardware. This has prooven to be difficult since you need a lot knowledge about engineering, machining, electronics and software. The electronics and software part is easy for me, but the mechanical part was new for me.