Canon PowerShot A1400

As if I had not enough cameras by now, a friend and colleague of mine brought to my attention that having a camera that accepts penlite batteries is a good thing to have, e.g. when on a journey.
And yes, that was my creed for a long time. This is why I actually decided to go for a Minolta DiMAGE F200, which I still have. Actually, whilst writing this, I just pulled the camera out of the bag and decided to feature this legacy digital point and shoot in a post of its own, stay tuned, the posts will have a lot in common.

Back to the Canon PowerShot A1400. A camera, running on AA batteries, shooting in RAW... a vacationers digital dream!
The A1400 a dream?! It's the lowest in the rank, buttom of the line and cheapest in price, just pretending to be usable. Some features clearly target late adopters or beginners, such as the optical view-finder (actually more a peephole, honestly) and the ?-button (HEEEEELP! I need somebody's HELP! So pleeeeaaase help meeeeee! - as I said, late adopters!).

Well yeah, on first sight, the A1400 does not really attractive to the untrained tech eye of a photo enthusiast. But, you're fooled!
CHDK will get you!

Yep, that's right, there is an alpha version of CHDK available for this very camera, the camera that runs on AA-cells! How cool is that?!
Not only does the camera record RAW in DNG format, it also is script-able, e.g. for HDR, time-lapse, etc... As long as you, or someone else for that matters, can program it, the camera can do it.

So, could I resist spending such a huge amount of dough to get me one of those? No, of course not! Do I regret buying the A1400? No, not at all (Non, Je ne regrette rien)!

Right, now that we established that the A1400 indeed shows signs of usability, lets have a look at the feature I disrespectfully disliked earlier in this text.

The Viewfinder
Yes, optically, the viewfinder is rubbish! It really is. The eye relieve is so short, you actually have to stick your cornea against the exit pupil, in order to see something.
However, the optical viewfinder allows you to switch the display off, saving precious power. Focus condition is indicated by a green LED next to the optical view finder. That's really good!
The viewfinder employs zoom optics, giving a rough indication of the framing, that good too!
The framing may be pretty off, however, at least you can see, under bright light conditions, w/o any power consumed, what you are aiming at. Big PLUS!
Yep, the optical viewfinder, however rubbish it is, is great!

The ?-Button
Well, this is the first ever camera I owned having a button with a question-mark on it! At the end, this is not too bad at all! The developers of CHDK obviously had similar feelings about the "?" and added an option to activate CHDK by means of pressing it.
Do I like this button now? Yes, you bet, I do!

Overall Feel
There is another Canon P&S in my bag, able to run CHDK, the IXUS-140. The IXUS is a slick device that easily slides into anyone's pockets... a carry about for everyday use. However, when taking the IXUS out of the pocket to actually take a photo, it feels rather fiddly due to the slick design (which made it so pocket-able) and the tiny control.
In contrast thereto, the PowerShot A1400 provides tougher haptics, due to a rougher surface finish. That's a good thing! It almost feels like the camera want to stick to you hand, rather than sliding out of it. Also, the A1400 provides a DSLR-like grip, to wrap your right hand around... 2 AA batteries live in there, the very batteries the camera was bought for in the first place.
All in all, the A1400's handling is very good.

Into Your Face!
And that is a totally different story now!
Humans have either right or left eye dominance. This is something very personal, like right and left handedness.
Contrary to handedness, the eye dominance can the tweaked with much more easily. Originally I have right eye dominance. However, in my past as an astronomer, yep, that's what I studied at Heidelberg, I trained myself to the using either eye for looking into an optical instrument.
And here is why I mention this anyway. The PowerShot A1400 is so small, with the shutter button on the right hand side, that you can only hold the view-finder up to your right eye. Using the left eye is close to impossible, very challenging at least.
Although, nowadays, I prefer to look though a (dSLR-) viewfinder with my left eye, the camera will be used right-eyed by me.

Conclusions
Do I like this camera? Yes, I do, and I like it a lot!
Finally, a cheap point and shoot, which can be use in a braced position, holding the thing against your face. This not only creates this connection between you and the camera, it also greatly reduces shake!
The following shot was taken hand-held at a roundabout, there is actually a cyclist ghosting through the shot in the foreground.

CONFUSED!

The image confuses me a lot actually. The light show some star-pattern, which would indicate an aperture beyond f/11. At the same tome there is some lens ghosting going on and some odd (non-Bokeh!) blur. It seems the lens is doing something really odd.
The point was, this shot is taken in the braced position and there is very little shake, although the shutter was open long enough to record a ghostly cyclist in the lower right of the photo.

Magic Lantern EOS M Shutter Bug continued

Studying the ML forum gave me the hint of trying different cards for solving the shutter bug issue by means other than torturing the camera.
It seems, the memory card used causes all the problems.
In my case, ML was installed on one of my "legacy" cards, an EMTEC class4 4GB, i.e. not the fastest card on the planet.
Different versions of ML did not solve the problem... hence the decision to try a different card.

The victim was a SanDisk Ultra (class10) 16GB card. Right away, Magic Lantern is booting fine, the Shutter Bug disappeared!

However, the camera develops temperatures, which do not seem natural, and so does the battery!
That's no good!

Not being sure what the camera is actually going through, I decided to not run anything hacky on it for the time being.

Summing up, the shutter bug seems to be related to the memory card used for ML. However, with ML running fine, stuff get hot, indicating that the hardware is not really enjoying the ride...

Up to now, I have not observed anything similar when using CHDK.

Lunar Photography on the Cheap II (gratis/free)

Yesterday I showed how to take a lunar shot with a simple point&shoot camera with a 8x zoom lens. Of course, the trick was that this inexpensive camera is able to shoot in RAW (thanks to CHDK).

Towards the end of the post, I mentioned that I used commercial software, i.e. Photomatix, to deal with the "develop" part of things. Further I stated that this process would potentially be possible with "free" software.

Today, I gave it a try with Luminance HDR (version 2.3.1), which is free software, to my knowledge.


Preparation

Luminance HDR asks for bracketed frames. Well, with my single shot, I only got one frame. So I used a very common HDR trick, namely creating more frames, differently "exposed" by software. Mind you, I am shooting DNG (digital negative).
Here is how this trick is done (with is free software by know):

• open the shot in Rawtherapee
• go to the EXPOSURE menu
• click on 'Neutral' (this should bring everything to default values)
• export the image using TIFF-16bit (this is your 0Ev shot)
• drop the exposure to -2Ev
• export the image using TIFF-16bit (this is obviously your -2Ev shot)
• raise the exposure to +2Ev
• export the image using TIFF-16bit (this is obviously your +2Ev shot)

Done! You now got 3 frames of identical size and format with different exposure values. That's what HDR-software likes!

The first results in Luminance HDR were not that great. Actually, they were so bad (a lot of grain and noise, over-exposed bits and what not), that I decided not to show those. The software is not easy to use, so I will give it a second try (see below).


Gratis

There is another bit of HDR-software available "for free", i.e. gratis. So we are not dealing with free software here, however, one can use this program without paying for a license.
The program is called FDRTools Basic.

Having loaded the 3 frames into FDRTools, the results were better, but not really satisfying yet. It appeared that the +2Ev frame was not serving any reasonable purpose, hence, I excluded this frame from the process (this is a very nice feature of FDRTools, it is like making invisible a layer in GIMP).
And guess what, the result was instantaneously much better than yesterday's Photomatix results!
Here is the re-sized output, converted into PNG:

2 frames pseudo HDR using FDRTools Basic

To me, that was a stunning result, coming from gratis software! A lot less noise than in yesterday's attempt.

Still, this photo could be slightly improved in GIMP, using the masking technique I explained in the previous post, i.e. the sky was treated with 'wavelet denoise' and the moon with 'wavelet sharpen'.

after GIMP

In the original 16 Megapixels image, the difference is somewhat visible. The above shown scaled down versions look almost identical to me.


Free

And here is the promised text about the entirely free solution.
Learned from my experience with FDRTools, I only loaded the -2Ev and the 0Ev frame into Luminance HDR. So for so good, but now the hard part.
Luminance HDR offers a lot of different algorithms to combine the frames. I went for "Profile 1".
Luminance HDR offers even more algorithms to tone-map the image. And this is where it went wrong in the earlier attempts. Having tried all different options, I selected "Reinhard '02", pulled 'Key Value' to 0.01 (none of the other tone-mapping parameters have any effect at this stage). In order to darken the image, I use the 'Adjust Levels' histograms. And voilà, we got a presentable result created by free software.

2 frames pseudo HDR using Luminance HDR

There is still more noise in the image than in the image created by FDRTools. Again, this calls for the GIMP.
Here we go, same technique as described previously... and here is the result:

denoise / sharpen by the GIMP

Yep, the differences are getting really subtle now, which of course speaks for the use of free software!

I hope you enjoyed this little journey from commercial to gratis to free. Personally, I am not sure if gratis or free won the contest. But certainly commercial produced the least favorable result in this particular case. But than, using software of this nature is somewhat of an unfair abuse, isn't it?

Lunar Photography on the Cheap

Well, this is not the usual thing I would do. However, since those things are possible, I will show 'em to you... and also explain how I did it.

First of all, when doing astro-photography, I would usually use a decent telescope, e.g. an APO refractor w/ a fluorite-glass lens... or a decent reflector with some decent optics.

However, today, I show you how you can achieve an acceptable shot of the moon, using an inexpensive Canon P&S (point 'n shoot). I my case, it is my trusty IXUS 140 (ELPH 130). Of course, we need to use CHDK in order to shoot in RAW.

The shot was taken in the blue hour (aka. magic hour or golden hour). According to the exif data, the shot was taken at f/6.9, 1/125s, 40.0mm, ISO400 (date: 10.01.2014 @ 16:40).

Here is what the camera though I was aiming for (jpeg done by the camera, in the hope that blogger does not tweak the image too much):

JPEG as recorded by the camera, scaled and saved as PNG

The same shot, recorded in RAW (DNG) by CHDK, was taken into Photomatix and the GIMP with the following steps performed on the image.

Photomatix:

• playing with single frame pseudo HDR parameters (tone mapping)
• tweaking highlights and shadows
• dropping exposure by some stops
• increasing contrast
• etc. 

Actually, for the fun of it, this is the image before I used the GIMP:

as exported from Photomatix, no noise-reduction yet

The GIMP:

• duplicating the image, creating a second layer
• creating a layer mask for the first layer (100% opacity)
• masking out the moon (the first layer now contains clouds only!)
• reducing the noise in the clouds using wavelet denoise
• on the lower layer (luna!), increasing sharpness using wavelet sharpen
• flatten the image
• export to PNG

the result of the process laid out above

Yep, this is the same shot... compare the cloud pattern...
After some tweaks, the daylight shot looks like a night-time photo. Also, some detail (noise!) was added to the moon, while noise (detail) was removed from the clouds selectively.

Here you have it, it does not take pro-gear to create a cool(ish) shot of the moon. I happen to have access to Photomatix, however, I feel that you might be able to use some free software to obtain the same effect... maybe even the GIMP!

In comparison, on screen, you might like the image before GIMP better... however, I believe on a print, the GIMPed shot might have an edge.

Tweak your photos and enjoy!

CHDK and Fast SD-Cards

Yes, a fast card does make a big deal difference when saving RAW in CHDK.
I know, everybody keeps saying this, and now, I am just one of them.

My first CHDK test using the IXUS 140 where done using 2 different SD-cards. The first to use was an EMTEC 4GB class 4. The second card was a SanDisk 2GB ultra II. Both cards worked fine, even when taking handheld bracketed shots, but there was certainly some waiting whilst the images were written.

Today, I upgraded to a SanDisk 8GB Extreme, which is class 10 and, according to the manufacturer, can write at 60MB/s (marked with 80MB/s, which is the read bandwidth). Actually, I am not really sure about such speeds.
However, when copying CHDK, I noticed a severe difference in speed. Also when taking pictures as digital negatives (DNG), an increase in speed was clearly noticeable.
The 8GB card set me back by €23.-, which is essentially 20% of the camera's price, however, I believe it was worth the additional cost.

Handheld Bracketing w/ CHDK

If you followed this (young) blog, you may know that the first ever post was about handheld HDR using the very fast 11fps of the Lumix LX7.

Lately, I kept myself busy with Canon stuff, in particular the CHDK and cheap P&S cameras. For purpose of experimentation, I bought an IXUS 140 (aka ELPH 130). The 140 is a cute little camera I really like, very pocketable, CHDK, although ALPHA, works as a charm!
The cheap chap that I am, I only afford the camera with a really old Sandisk Ultra II 2GB SD-card. I am sure that there are faster cards available... however, this is what was sitting unused in my desk's drawer, hence, that is what I use(d).

The drawback of using an older generation SD-card is of course the speed in which data can be written to it. In particular when saving data in RAW, this plays a major role.

For matters of experimentation, I took the camera, set CHDK to bracketing in continuous mode and took some shots. Photomatix was used to create the DHR images.

The first HDR image that I would like to share is a shot in which I used 3 frames recorded as DNG (which is essentially raw data). The middle frame was shot with -1 Ev. Lens distortion correction was applied to the final image using RawTherapee.

3 DNGs - lens distortion correction using RawTherapee

If you look closely, the branches in the center of the image display some ghosting. It was a windy scene and I did not go through any major anti-ghosting procedure.

The second shot is an HDR image using 5 JPG frames. Again, the middle image at -1 Ev.
No geometrical correction applied here, mind you, the camera's firmware does something already when recording JPGs... something that actually over compensates at wide angles.

5 JPGs - no correction, note that the camera itself over compensated

Here you have it, even a slow and inexpensive camera can be used for handheld HDR photography. 3 frames in RAW (or DNG) or 5 frames in JPG, w/o a tripod, both demand a very calm hand...
In this shot, I used the anti-ghosting tool of photomatix on the approaching tram.

Here is how I do it, inspired by Discovery Channel reporting about snipers:

1. calmly prepare your camera, making sure all the setting are correct, e.g. exposure compensation
2. stand firm on both legs, feet at shoulder width
3. breath slowly but steadily, wait until you body settles
4. hold your camera with both hands
5. press your arms against your chest
6. relax
7. breath in deeply
8. exhale slowly half pressing the shutter release
9. when your chest is relaxed and your lungs exhaled, gently press and hold the shutter release
10. freeze (not thinking about it!)
11. hold your breath and wait until your camera recorded the 3, 5 or 7 frames you need.

Step 11 may actually take some time, training increases the time you can hold your breath w/o moving.

All in all, handheld HDR photography remains a challenge. It is best done with a fast bracketing camera, such as the Lumix LX7, however if the camera at your disposal is somewhat slower, there is still hope!

Record photons!

To RAW or not to RAW?

Sure, RAW is cool, I use it all the times! However, there are some advantages of in-camera computations that should not be put aside.

The CHDK allows you to store, with your Canon camera, RAW files. Such files (I am sure you know all about this) represent the data as recorded by the sensor plus some meta-data such as camera settings.

RAW is good, it allows to manipulate image data whenever you want, e.g. adjusting white balance. There is not compression in the raw format, since it represent raw data. Which is good, because there will be no compression artifacts.

However, there are some down-sides to ignoring the camera's computations. Since CHDK records both, the processed JPG as well as the RAW (DNG - see below), we are able to see the differences ... fingers crossed that blogger does not "improve" the images.

The images below are results of the same photo, i.e. frame. Both files were taken from the memory card, scaled down and saved as 95% quality JPG.

Lets have a look at the raw image:

DNG (raw image) as recorded by the camera

Obviously there is some vignetting going on, cf. upper left corner. The image also shows a very strong distortion as known from wide-angle lenses... mind you, those buildings are all straight...
Colors are rich and there is a good contrast. The finer detail, e.g. fancy structure on the left building's roof, show clear definition.

On the JPG side of things:

JPG as processed by the camera

We are now loosing definition, very clearly. Also the colors are less vibrant. The image is clearly cropped down, c.f. the bicycle in the foreground.
However, there is some lens-distortion correction going on. It seems that the camera actually over-corrects. Note that the modern building bends outwards to the right in the upper right corner.

Correct me if I am wrong, in my perception, the over-correction of the camera is less offending than the distortion seen in the raw image. Of course, in GIMP (potentially also in photoshop, but I can't tell) one can correct for such distortions, however, in the daily life of a P&S-user, it might be even reasonable to just go with JPG in the end.
Mind you, even though it might not be advisable, stacking techniques, such as HDR, can be done using JPG.

Note: Pure raw-format changes from camera to camera, hence, sometimes it is useful to use DNG (digital negative) format to store raw sensor information. The DHCK offers the option to store raw images directly in DNG. Personally, I do make use of that option. Up to now, I had no issues with DNG, when created within the camera.

Where Photography Meets Hacking

"What's that all about?", I hear you thinking... Well, this is where thing a really getting cool.
CANON cameras, at least some, in particular the cheaper ones, all of a sudden, make sense to be preferred over other brands. Yep, that's right! This is how to get a camera shooting in RAW or even DNG for very little money.

Being honest, on this topic, I am just reporting, nothing bears any contribution from me, all honors to the guys who made the following available:
CHDK

No, this is not some sort of UNIX command such as chmod, chgrp, chown, etc. it is the Canon Hack Development Kit... great stuff!
Mind you, today's digital cameras are more like computers. They might even have the compute power that the world was dreaming of 20 years ago. CHDK makes use of this fact and open a new world to photographers.

I learned about the CHDK some months ago and I was a little scared applying it to my older generation EOS DSLR. Anyway, this camera does everything I wanted anyways, so why bother?
A more recent member of my camera family had to hold up for my curiosity, the G15. If you study the CHDK homepage, you will notice why I made that choice.
CHDK works fine with the G15, however, again, there was not much to gain from the kit. The G15 shoots in raw, has custom settings etc. So, yes, CHDK worked fine, but was not adding "much" at the end (more about that at the end of this post).

There is a catch to the G15, it is not a camera to carry about in your pocket. Neither is the Panasonic DMC-LX7 (presently my favorite camera), although doing a bit better in terms of dimensions, the LX7 is still to big for a camera to carry on a daily basis. Something smaller had to join the group.
Have a look:

Canon IXUS 140, Samsung S760, Panasonic DMC-LX7, Canon G15, (*)

The Samsung S760 (see earlier post) followed me quite a bit, in my pocket, it is however clear that neither the LX7 nor the G15 will be able to take that space.

Initially I though of a Panasonic DMC-XS3, for its compactness and the advanced sensor, however, for the good stuff provided by CHDK, a new Canon was in order, one that fits into any pocket w/o disturbing too much. My first choice fell on an IXUS 125, being on sale for just €66, however, the store was not local, which would cause additional cost of shipping. My second choice was the IXUS 140, which not only has a longer zoom than the IXU 125, but also employs WiFi. A local store asks €119 for this camera, so I bought it.

Here comes the good stuff. There is an alpha-version of CHDK available for the IXUS 140. Believing that this camera will be very popular, I am sure that this alpha will evolve into a full release (I am willing to help). 
Anyhow, for just above (or under) €100,- one can get a pocket compact camera that shoots in RAW! How cool is that?!
And here comes the magic, your inexpensive little Canon is not only shooting in RAW, it is even able to create DNG-files (Adobe digital negative).

Best things to come (this is where I close the loop to the G15), with CHDK suitable cameras can be automated to an extend beyond wildest dreams. CHDK offers 2 different ways for automating your Canon by scripts: Lua and uBASIC. At a first look, Lua reminds me of FORTRAN with influences of C. uBASIC looks like BASIC to me, fair enough.
Hence, due to scripting, the camera also can do things that only you can come up with and you were only able to dream about to be implemented into your camera.
And... thanks to the small form factor in which some Canon cameras are available today, all that fits in your pocket easily.



(*) Note the different setting of the mode dial: the S760 on manual for the recent HDR demo, the LX7 on C1 (handheld HDR mode) and the G15 on P (like P&S). And yes, I like to use the straps, preventing me from dropping stuff to destruction.