Private Thoughts Made Public

Here are a couple of stop motion animations (three, actually) my son and I made this afternoon using my digital camera and a demo version of an animation program. I think they’re very good!

Last week I bought some extension tubes for the camera off eBay. An extension tube is an attachment for an SLR camera that fits between the lens and the camera body, effectively making the lens longer. I bought the set for a mere £4, thinking if they didn’t work then it wasn’t exactly a waste of a lot of money.

I didn’t get around to playing with them for a few days, but the other night I set the camera up on the tripod and had a go. The tubes are just hollow plastic tubes, one has the same mount as the Nikon lenses, so you can attach it to the camera, another has the same mount as the camera body, so you can attach that one to the lens. The tubes all screw together, and you can put any or all of the other tubes in the middle to make the extension the length you want it to be.

Normally, the camera talks to the lens via a series of electrical connection points, but when using these tubes, those connections are lost, so the camera thinks the lens isn’t attached. This means that you lose all the automatic functions of the camera, and are forced to work in purely manual mode. Everything from shutter speed to aperture to focus was done manually.

So, with my expensive camera loaded up with its £4 extension tubes, mounted on its £1.50 tripod, and set into remote shutter mode, I started to take some pictures. The experiments I did were all indoors, with just the normal lighting in the room. I had to set the ISO to 1600 and use a three second exposure to get the pictures coming out even halfway decent, but once I managed to work that out, I was very impressed with the results! I looked around the room trying to find things to photograph, and set up a stack of dvd’s in front of the camera so the object I was photographing was level with the lens. This is why the first pictures I took were of the stack of dvd’s itself…

(click on each thumbnail to see a larger version of the image)

I then took a photo of the business end of an AA battery:

a safety pin:

The edge of a microfibre cleaning cloth:

A bar code:

and finanlly, a tape measure:

Here’s a picture of everything together so you can see them all at “actual scale” as it were:

I don’t know how often I’ll use the tubes, or if it’s practical to use them outdoors at all. With all the tubes on the camera the level of magnification is rather huge, and the objects I’ll be photographing like this will, by necessity, be tiny. I’ll do some more experiments soon with fewer tubes on the camera and see if I can take any photographs hand-held, but in the meantime I think these cheap tubes were a worthwhile investment!

I discovered a neat feature on my car this morning. If you’ve got the windscreen wipers on and put the car into reverse, it automatically puts the rear screen wiper on, and keeps it on as long as the car is in reverse gear. That’s one of the “so simple, it’s obvious” ideas, and something I never really noticed was missing on previous cars I’ve driven. I think I’ll notice it missing when I drive a different car from now on, though.

As a related issue, I’ve not been doing any motorway driving this week, having had the week off work, and if I drive carefully and don’t have to start and stop too often at traffic lights, I can average 64mpg – I’m still on the first tank of fuel and I’ve had the car nearly two weeks now.

I’m happy all over at the moment!

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve bought myself a new car, and picked it up last Monday morning. On the whole, I’m impressed! Here are the good and bad points:

The features I like:

• I’m averaging 54mpg out of the car. This is really impressive, considering the sort of driving I’m doing. My journey to work is half motorways and half hilly country roads. I’ve driven a couple of hundred miles in it so far, and only used about a third of the tank!
• The car is comfortable, easy to get in and out of, and looks fantastic.
• There’s a warning beep if you drive away without putting your seat belt on.
• The trip computer. This is the first car I’ve had that’s had one of these on, and it’s interesting to find out what the instant mpg is, the total mpg for the trip, the trip time and so on.
• You can set an alarm to buzz when you go over a certain speed.
• There’s a useful “mute” button on the steering wheel for the radio.
• The lights turn off when you switch off the ignition, this means it’s impossible to leave the lights on and wear the battery flat.

The things I’m not so keen on:

• It doesn’t have Blue&Me. This is because it’s a 2008 model, and Blue&Me was an optional extra last year. So I still have to use the wireless radio adapter for the iPod. I’m not overly bothered about the bluetooth thing, I hardly ever need to use the phone when I’m driving, but the iPod functionality would have been nice. My fault this one, I should have checked before I bought the car (not that it would have stopped me, probably)
• The Astra had wider door pockets, with a curve at the front big enough to put a bottle or can in. The Punto has drinks holders, but I’m not convinced they’re deep enough to hold a bottle upright when going round a sharp bend!
• The clock in the Astra was connected to the radio’s RDS system, so it always kept itself up to date. I don’t think the clock in the Punto does this.
• There’s no light in the boot.
• There doesn’t seem to be a spare wheel, only some sort of compressor to fix punctures by the side of the road. I’ll have to check this with the dealer.
• I can see part of the dashboard trim reflected in the tinted windows when I look in the wing mirrors.

But these are minor quibbles (well, everything but the spare wheel is a minor quibble!). So far, though, I think I’ve made a good choice with this car.