Pellicle mirror cameras

[Basalt]

I'm getting seriously into time lapse photography, I'm very aware that this isn't good for the lifetime of my D3100 - plus I'd like to do very long shoots of a month or so and don't want my camera tied up for that long so I'm thinking of getting another SLR for the job.

Am I right in thinking a pellicle mirror camera won't suffer as much from repeated shutter firings? If so I might start looking at them.

 

[Garbz]

It's not the mirror that traditionally gives up but the shutter blades themselves. The mirror is a solid piece that bounces up and down, but the shutter blades are hair thin pieces of titanium. Even the slightest bend or flex and they crash into each other bringing the shutter mechanism to an untimely demise.

What you would really want is some camera that captures frames without a mechanical component in front of it. Some kind of dedicated timelapse camera would probably be best suited. Or even a high quality webcamlike device attached to a computer. Digital security camera? Something like that.

 

[unpopular]

... or a mirrorless like the NEX, or micro four-thirds.

Are these going to be made into timelapse video, or do you need high resolution for print?

 

[Basalt]

My main aim is video but it's always good to have the option to print some frames - sometimes there's just that one frame than deserves to be on the wall. 5mp would do the job happily. Capturing video as well would be a bonus - there's a few things where a short sequence of video followed by a TL run on the same camera could be useful.

I do have a dedicated TL camera - a Brinno TL200 - pretty cheap but it does for screening subjects to work out if they're worth shooting and for working out the best interval, the image quality can be useless - anything pale near a dark object tends to end up a nice even blown out white. 'tis great for pointing at clouds for half the day though.

Thanks for the advice

 

[unpopular]

I think that a mirrorless would be a good option. You could get an Olympus EP-series with this intervalometer. Used EP1's are inexpensive, and you could get a good screw-mount lens for it since AF isn't as important. The whole thing could end up costing less than $600 easily.

https://www.pclix.com/


If you're handy, you could build your intervalometer own with an arduino very, very easily.

 

[Basalt]

I'll have a look at that. I was planning on using a raspberry pi - if it ever arrives ( end of June apparently ) for intervals and dissecting a camera remote to build usb control - means I can have variable intervals and if I get my programming up to speed an intelligent control that triggers higher capture rates when something moves faster - such as a petal falling by using a cheap webcam for motion detection. thanks

 

[unpopular]

On another note, what is the rasberry pi's API, java, c++, something wierd? I've been interested in the rasberry platform, but I don't want to deal with C++.

Keep in mind, also, that the Arduino is also tightly integrated with Processing. You could run Processing on the Rasberry to analyze incomming information and either use an arduino or the Rasberry's GPIO to control the camera...

 

[Basalt]

It runs Ubuntu or other versions of Linux so can be flexible - I was going to stick python on there, there's also an existing package called Motion for linux that does pretty much all I'd be asking of it, all I'd need is some basic scripting.

 

[unpopular]

Cool. So you can access the GPIO interface through python, directly out of the box or do you need to download additional software or configure it for this functionality?

 

[Garbz]

The Raspberry Pi is a computer. You can't forget that. It depends entirely on the software you run on it for how to access it. The Linux flavour comes with doesn't have a dedicated driver for the GPIO interface but apparently others work. The driver for BCM2708 allows you to access the GPIO directly in any language, and even through the shell via "/sys/class/GPIO" though from what I've read the BCM2708 pinout is different from the Raspberry Pi so driving pin3 won't actually drive pin3 but a different pin.

Expect a dedicated driver soon.