Friday, 11 June 2010
Blooming
The movement of Oxalis triangularis is not limited to its leaves; a high definition timelapse of the opening of the flowers is really spectacular!
Monday, 7 June 2010
Moving Plants and Distorted Time
Plants move a surprisingly large amount, whether it is phototropism (growth towards light), nastic movements towards or away from stimuli (eg. photonasty) or other rapid plant movements. Oxalis triangularis (also known as the love plant or purple shamrock) goes to "sleep" every night. The leaves are light sensitive and fold away as the light levels drop towards the end of a day in an example of photonasty.
Click through to see a high definition time-lapse - one image captured every 30 seconds for about 1.5 hours, played back at 25 frames per second; ~750x actual speed! The exposure time was progressively increased through the video so the drop in ambient light levels which triggers the movement can't be seen.
Click through to see a high definition time-lapse - one image captured every 30 seconds for about 1.5 hours, played back at 25 frames per second; ~750x actual speed! The exposure time was progressively increased through the video so the drop in ambient light levels which triggers the movement can't be seen.
Thursday, 15 April 2010
Intelligent Image Scaling
Intelligent modification of images is all the rage at the moment, especially with Photoshop CS5's fancy new tools for healing imperfections in the image... This is my take on a classic implementation of intelligent image shrinking, using an edge detection to determine the bits of the picture that are "interesting" then drawing seams down the image through the boring regions and then removing pixels along this path.
This implementation is 100% coded from scratch and can be used for any project under the terms of the GPL v2 or later.
The test image:
The edge detection to find objects:
And 5 example low detail vertical "seams" which run through the image. These are the lines of boring pixels which will be removed to make the image narrower.
Removing 100 seams of pixels makes the image 100px narrower. See the following images for an example of the resizing in progress:
You can watch the scaling of four example images at YouTube.
Download the code for the ImageJ macro (used for rescaling of these images) here.
Software used:
Image creation: ImageJ
Video transcoding: VLC media player
This implementation is 100% coded from scratch and can be used for any project under the terms of the GPL v2 or later.
The test image:
The edge detection to find objects:
And 5 example low detail vertical "seams" which run through the image. These are the lines of boring pixels which will be removed to make the image narrower.
Removing 100 seams of pixels makes the image 100px narrower. See the following images for an example of the resizing in progress:
You can watch the scaling of four example images at YouTube.Download the code for the ImageJ macro (used for rescaling of these images) here.Software used:
Image creation: ImageJ
Video transcoding: VLC media player
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Webcam Microscopy
Just a very short post sadly, real life is pressing down on me again... But check out my latest Instructable; with a normal webcam and 5 minutes you can make a >100x microscope...
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Digital Pinhole Photography
Pinhole photography is a fantastic example of how really basic optics, the simple particle-like quality of light, can give impressive results... Having recently got my hands on a digital SLR I had a play to make a high quality pinhole "lens" for it.
Basing the pinhole on a camera body cap makes it very simple to handle, it can be swapped on and off like a normal lens and has no problems with light leakage etc.
The pinhole is handmade from a piece of 0.5mm aluminium with a hole poked through using a penkife and safety pin.
Given it is 100% handmade and stuck together with tape it gives impressively good results!
If you are interested in making one yourself check out my instructables project with step by step instructions.
Basing the pinhole on a camera body cap makes it very simple to handle, it can be swapped on and off like a normal lens and has no problems with light leakage etc.
The pinhole is handmade from a piece of 0.5mm aluminium with a hole poked through using a penkife and safety pin.
Given it is 100% handmade and stuck together with tape it gives impressively good results!
If you are interested in making one yourself check out my instructables project with step by step instructions.
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