Happy Canada Day! We are having fun celebrating in Elora today. We had a pancake breakfast, saw the parade, and Aila got to sit in a fire truck! Tonight, if Aila is up for it, we are going to check out the fireworks. It will be Aila's first fireworks since Canada Day 2011... hopefully she will enjoy them as much tonight as she did back then.

I bought Angela a new camera for our anniversary, so her old camera is not being used anymore. I have been wanting to shoot some more timelapse videos but I don't want to use my 5D Mark II due to wear and tear on the physical shutter. Normally, the SD450 doesn't have the ability to do fancy things like timelapse, but luckily there is an open source firmware update that you can load onto just about any Canon camera that gives you full access to all the hardware in the camera.

It really is a programmer's dream come true. Not only does this firmware allow you to manually control the shutter speeds, ISO values and focus point, but it also allows you to write scripts that are executed right on the camera, with no external computer required! It is hard to describe exactly how powerful this is, but for one example of how stupidly awesome this firmware is, consider the fact that I can now play video games on Angela's old camera from 2005.

One of the other things that CHDK lets you do is shoot in RAW. Now, on the SD450, the RAW file is still only 8 bits, but it does give you a little extra room for editing because you get access to the captured image data before it goes through the internal processing and JPEG encoding in the camera. As an example, here is a photo I took of Aila sitting in a fire truck this morning. Using the RAW image, I was able to tweak it just a little bit in Adobe Camera Raw and get the image you see here without any further adjustment in Photoshop. If you hover your mouse over the image, you can compare it to the JPEG image that the camera produced. In other words, without the custom firmware, I would be stuck trying to manipulate the second image in Photoshop to get someting that looked good. But with the custom firmware the photo practically popped out at me with just a few minor tweaks.

Technical details: This photo was taken with Angela's SD450 with CHDK firmware in RAW mode (everything else set to Auto).

Comments

Oh wow, that's a really cool firmware upgrade.

Also, Aila is adorable and SO
BIG!

The custom firmware allows me to have full manual control over the camera, so I
had fun using it to take photos of the fireworks.  Here is a picture I took
with the camera manually set to ISO 100, infinity focus with an exposure time
of 4 seconds:


By the way, Aila loved the fireworks!  She wore her special headphones so that
it wouldn't be too loud.  After the show she kept talking about how bright they
were and all the different colours and shapes she saw.