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.

I think we should put all the fired Apprentices in the cabinet, they’ll do a much better job than the current lot!

After five and a half years and over 85,000 miles (plus the 22,000 miles the car had on it when I bought it), I’ve decided that it’s finally time to trade it in for a newer model. I’ve been extremely impressed with the car (a Vauxhall Astra), it’s still solid and reliable, although it’s now starting to show signs of age. There’s an intermittent squak from the wheels, and the ride isn’t as good as it used to be. These things could be fixed, but it’s probably better to change the car before I have to spend lots of money keeping it going, rather than after! When I bought the car I said I was going to keep it until it had done 100,000 miles, and it’s done that admirably. Part of me will be sorry to see it go!

So, what to get as a replacement? I know car dealers are getting a bit desperate to shife stock at the moment and there are some stonking deals to be had on a brand new car, but most of them are still out of my price range. I visited a few dealers, picked up a few brochures, and had a test drive in a Toyota IQ. This is a really nifty little car, perfect for town driving, it’s tiny on the outside but more than big enough on the inside for a driver and passenger. It felt like a bigger car when I drove it as well, I didn’t feel that it was going to tip over on the corners or anything like that. But (there has to be a but, doesn’t there?) I don’t think it would be suitable for the relatively high mileage I do, and it was also quite expensive. The car has only just been launched, so there aren’t any second-hand ones available on the market yet.

Another car I was tempted to look at was the new Ford Fiesta. This car has had excellent reviews, and I read in What Car magazine about a chap who’s bought one who does about 200 miles a day, so at least he’s pinning his hopes on it being solid and reliable! Again, it’s a brand new car and there aren’t any used ones available yet, as a result I discounted this car on the basis of price.

I found an internet broker (www.buyacar.co.uk) and had a look at their prices for different makes and models, and happened to look at their prices for Fiat Puntos. Wow, very impressive, might be worth a look, this one! Off I went to the local dealer, picked up a brochure, and booked a test drive for the next day. I’d decided I wanted a diesel car this time round, the sort of driving I do would make a diesel cheaper in the long run, even after the higher initial price and higher cost of fuel. The test drive I had in the car was very short, the dealership was short-staffed that day, but they asked me to come back the following weekend and I’d be able to take the car out on my own for an hour.

I wasn’t initially too impressed with the car, the gear change took a little getting used to, and I stalled it once or twice, but that was probably because I wasn’t used to driving a diesel, or maybe the pedal in the Fiat was a little stiffer then the one I was used to in the Astra. I was willing to give the car another shot, though.

The next weekend I went back and as promised, was given the keys to a car and asked to bring it back in about an hour. I took it on the route I use to go to and from work every day, which is a route that provided a mixture of motorway driving, country roads, and start/stop town driving. I worked out how to use the trip computer, and used to tell me the average fuel consumption for the trip. When I returned the car to the dealer it was reading 59.8 miles per gallon.

By now my mind was pretty much made up. The car was nice to drive, it had all the bells and whistles on it that I wanted (specifically somewhere I could plug my iPod into!) so the only thing left was to work out a deal. I didn’t need to haggle with the guy, he gave me a decent trade-in on my car, and offered me a price I was prepared to pay on a car with the level of trim that I wanted. Actually, it was the car I’d driven on the short test drive the previous weekend. First registered 11 months ago, the car had stood on the dealer’s forecourt and only been used for short test drives in all that time. It’s only got 77 miles on the clock! He’s giving me the full three-year warranty and will make sure the car has been checked over and is in tip-top condition before I pick it up, which should be next Monday if the finances go through without a hitch.

Even though the car was registered last June, I’m still treating it as a brand new car, because even if you buy one that’s only got delivery miles on it, it could have been sitting out in the elements for several months anyway.

Roll on next week!

Following on from this post, I can tell you that I have since bought myself… er, my son (cough, cough) one of these Mindstorms sets. Actually, I ended up buying two from eBay, as both auctions ended about the same time. Haven’t sold the other one yet, it’s sitting on top of my bookcase at home. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I made that original post though!