Photography

It took me some time to write a post about photo gear.

As my Canon EOS 40D is now really becoming old, I’m looking for an upgrade. Sadly, my photography hasn’t evolved much, so I most probably won’t wait for the 7D Mk II (if that one still makes sense, given the 6D) and will stay with their prosumer x0D line. Surprisingly, it took Canon three years to introduce a successor to the 60D: The EOS 70D. Although I originally considered the 60D a downgrade within that line, my view has changed with its successor: The reduced weight is not something negative, the reduced size is minimal, the plastic housing at least has got weather sealing, and the swivel screen perfectly fits the camera’s video capabilities. I’d get (compared to the 40D):

• 20 MP instead of 10 MP,
• DIGIC 5+ processor instead of DIGIC 3,
• ISO 12800 max. instead of ISO 1600,
• 19 AF points instead of 9,
• Dual-pixel AF in Live View instead of a manual trigger with mirror flip,
• 98% viewfinder coverage instead of 95%,
• [Update: Viewfinder with switchable gridline overlay and electronic level,]
  
• HD movies instead of no movies at all,
• HDMI output instead of plain old analog,
• Weather sealing instead of none,
• High-res swivel touch screen instead of low-res static plain LCD,
• Built-in Wi-Fi for remote operation using Canon’s smartphone app(!!),
• Built-in flash as off-camera remote flash controller!
• Continuous shooting with a rate of 7 fps instead of 6.5 fps, but the RAW image burst goes down from 17 to 16 and the JPEG burst from 75 to 65.

So, quite a jump in technology during the last six years. I plan my purchase for the end of this year.

Some quotes of myself from four years ago:

“Cheap” should mean here that you don’t need to spend money on extra hardware like a remote timer or on extra software like Windoze [...]

My hope is that I can use gphoto2 with an Android smartphone.

Somehow this is still a Linux-post, as Android simply is the most popular Linux distribution to date. Btw, PC and smartphone don’t count as dedicated extra hardware. But you might need to purchase an app and a USB adapter:

Meanwhile I use the awesome DSLR Controller on my Android smartphone in USB host-mode to create time-lapse picture sequences on my aging Canon EOS 40D—a thing that wouldn’t work with a diePhone, I guess. This app can do a lot more, of course. Up to now, you have to rely on USB. However, as Wi-Fi enabled DSLRs are appearing, there is some hope to get rid of that cable and adapter one day; Canon’s own EOS Remote app doesn’t support time-lapse shooting yet. [Update: To equip your camera with Wi-Fi, you could hack an Android TV stick!]

The most elegant solution would of course be located within the camera itself. Canon is still sleeping in this regard, but at least there’s the third-party Magic Lantern firmware add-on for some newer models, also sporting an intervalometer. My 40D is not (yet, but I guess won’t ever be) supported.

You should still set the camera to a resolution at or slightly above the HD 1080p resolution, which in my case is 1936×1288. You should fix the aperture and ISO values, and probably also the exposure time. [Update: In addition, fix the white balance. Also, don’t forget to cover the viewfinder with the eyepiece cover on your strap, as otherwise you might get different exposures that result in flickering!]

After getting the images to your Linux machine, you need to crop the pictures from 3:2 to 16:9 (in my case 1936×1089) or crop a 1920×1080 patch directly. You can do this with a simple script using ImageMagick:

(GNU Parallel didn’t work for me.) You can then issue

to render an HD video into a format that’s also recognized by your smartphone.

Finally, you could use OpenShot to edit your videos and add background music. (You could of course compose that music yourself using FOSS as well...)