Camera gear trading

It has been busy month. I sold two pieces of camera gear and bought one. No chances of getting rich, I spent much more than I got from sales.

First I decided to sell my old Canon EF 70-210mm f4.0 because I did not have use for it and I do not see it as a collectable item. I put an advert to www.gumtree.com and I got some contacts pretty soon. The idea with gumtree is that is local so no worries of posting and such. Eventually one guy came to check it and bought it. I think both parties were happy with the price.

The second item to sell was something I did not plan to sell. My Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS failed and I was then forced to sell it as a faulty lens. I thought there wont be enough interest in local level so I put an advert to UK eBay. That was the first time I tried to sell anything on eBay. I made an advert with very clearly stating the fault of the lens. I set it up a ten day auction without reserve with 0.99 starting price. It went pretty well, I got reasonable price and I sent the lens away.

As you might seen from my twitter feed, I bought Canon 550D with working EF-S 18-55mm IS lens. The main reason was its video features. I have been trying out various things and I am happy with the quality. However, it is not a point and shoot video camera. Practice is needed to get used to the controls and smooth handling. Couple test videos can been seen on Vimeo.

Now I need to find someone to buy my old Canon 450D body. Two bodies are nice to have but I think there wont be too much usage for the old one. Maybe I will try gumtree again.

Adding features to Canon IXUS 60 with CHDK

I bought my Canon IXUS 60 from Zürich during summer 2006. It was my first digital camera and it served well until 2008 when I bought Canon 450D. After that it has been left mostly unused and that is a shame.

Then I got to know about the CHDK project and saw some exciting new uses for the old IXUS. This Canon Hack Development Kit extends your camera and it allows to run simple applications on it. One example is time lapse photography and, actually, that got me interested.

Installation was quite simple on OS X with scripted CHDK Mac Installer. The only problem was to choose the right version as there are two for IXUS 60/SD600 but with trial and error I got it working. That might sound risky but the installation is done on the memory card so nothing is changed permanently on the camera. For me the right one was 1.00a instead of 1.00d.

The camera starts now from the software on the memory card and it displays CHDK splash screen at the startup. The normal CHDK comes with many new options but for time lapse photography it requires a script. I chose Ultra Intervalometer and so far I have been happy with it. I was a bit worried how long the old battery would last but I managed to take couple hundred shots with one minute intervals. The important power saving trick is to set the LCD screen go off as soon as possible.



I have made couple time lapse videos but they are not suitable for public as they show our messy living room. The plan is to make something better and upload it to vimeo or youtube. Meanwhile, I recommend you take a look at the CHDK project page in case your camera is supported.

Canon EOS utility and tethered shooting preview quality

Canon DSLRs come with a software bundle and one of the applications is EOS Utility. Among other features it allows you to transfer your shots right away to your computer over USB cable and it also displays a quick preview of the photo on the computer screen. This is pretty handy because it is much easier to see results on the big screen. Obviously the USB cable length limits your movements so I guess people will use this for studio shots mostly.

I was playing around with this feature and I noticed that the preview had rather bad quality. After trying out different settings it turned out that shooting in RAW+JPEG mode instead of RAW only resulted better previews. Apparently the quick preview's RAW conversion outputs only low resolution images.