Tweaking a Camera to Suit a Hobby

When he is not fighting fires in Waterloo, Iowa, Pete Lilja likes to rig his camera to a weather balloon and send it up to record the world.

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Pete Lilja
An image taken from a high-altitude balloon flight was photographed with a Canon PowerShot A570is camera about 100,000 feet above northeast Iowa in November 2009.
“I got a picture when the balloon was at about 87,000 feet above northeast Iowa,” he said. “We could see Lake Michigan. That was pretty impressive.”

To take these photos, Mr. Lilja, of Cedar Falls, packed his Canon A570is with a GPS transmitter in a cushioned box (and attached his phone number in case the GPS failed). He chose that particular point-and-shoot camera because a group of programmers from around the world had created software that gave photo hobbyists like him the ability to change the way Canon intended the camera to operate.

It is called the Canon Hack Development Kit (or C.H.D.K. for short). Mr. Lilja used it to reprogram his camera to snap one shot every 15 seconds on its journey into the stratosphere. The software has allowed photographers using more than 50 models of Canon PowerShot cameras to reprogram the time lapse instructions to record construction projects or to use motion-sensing programs to capture animals in the deep woods. It can also be used to alter the camera’s exposure control to produce imaginative images in difficult lighting. (The hacks do not work with the more expensive D.S.L.R. cameras). Development of the hack kit began as a volunteer project about three years ago. It can be customized by adding programs written in “ubasic” or “lua,” two common languages that are fairly easy for programmers. Many C.H.D.K. users also swap scripts with each other and modify the work of others.

But the hacking kit works only with Canon cameras, one of the most popular brands. Apparently, no such extensive project exists for hacking the software that runs Nikon, Sony, Panasonic or other popular cameras.

The Canon hack kit is good at setting up a camera to perform simple, repetitive tasks.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/personaltech/27basics.html?src=me&ref=technology

Back when I was in school it wasn't so cool to be a geek. I'm really glad things have changed since then.

That's a really cool geeky thing to do.