I am happy to announce our new initiative: ElysiaVisuals. Elysia Visuals distributes professional motion control equipment that can be used for time-lapse photography or for general video footage. We mainly distribute equipment from Dynamic Perception. But we are in the process of expanding our offering in the near future. We have been very interested in time lapse photography for the last two years. This had lead to the development of our own equipment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
