Creativity to Spare

I have a couple of designs for simple stabilizers for your digital video camera.
I have built these and have a few suggestions about use and some hacks and modifications.

The first design is from a site called
$14 Steadycam The Poor Mans Steadicam
From Johnny Chung Lee here is a link to his site where he has a kit if you don’t want to find the parts yourself.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/
It is basically 3-10″ iron pipes, a “T” connector and 3 end caps. A weight for the end and a mounting bolt for the camera. This is super easy to assemble except for the drilling of the end-caps. Since the pipes are iron you need a vise and a good drill and bit. Wear your googles. I have taken his advice on making a low mount. Mine is made from 2-90 degree angle pieces of steel, that I bolted together. This low rig is great for skateboarding videos, as you will see at the end of the cast. Thanks to the old man army for letting me shoot them one cloudy Sunday morning.
http://www.oldmanarmy.com

The other is from instructables and is a take-off on the FigRig. It is a steering wheel design stabilizer and is made from PVC pipe and I modified the design by using some electrical PVC conduit to make a more round appearance.
Here is the Octagon design
http://www.instructables.com/id/PVC-FIG-RIG/

So instead of all those 45 degree elbows I used the electrical PVC conduit which is pretty firm for short distances but can become a bit too flexible at longer lengths and heavier weights. So I will probably redo mine at some point and feature a top PVC pipe and side bars part to stiffen it up. There might be some other solutions- like bending PVC with heat, or maybe finding and actual steering wheel to modify.
The other mod is the middle mounting spot. Which I placed horizontal so that I could make a rest for the rig, to be able to set it down. When I use my Panasonic DVX-100 on this rig I use a Zoom Controller attached to the right hand side of the rig. The controller adjusts Zoom/Iris/Focus and Record with just your thumb it is awesome. I’ll add a picture soon. You can paint them but make sure to let it dry a nice long time. I used some black satin finish spray paint. The last mod is to add some grips using the type that a made for tennis rackets.

The real trick is practice, over time you will start making nice smooth shots. You will probably notice an immediate improvement in your shots just getting your hands off the camera. But true mastery will only come with time. The rigs are heavy, that is partly the point to add some mass to the little camera so you don’t fling it around so much. Walking with the rig is the hardest part, and will have to just be practiced. You see professionals advertising for a trained steadicam operator, so even with the big pro stuff it takes time.

Here is one extra link –
http://homebuiltstabilizers.com

To take pictures of lightning you need two main things. A tripod (or some alternative – see episode 1) and a long exposure time of about 10-15 seconds. This is will allow enough time for you to catch a bolt or maybe two. The problem with leaving the exposure open that long is that a great deal of noise will be generated by your digital camera’s sensor, this is one nice thing about film photography, no long exposure noise. This problem is slowly getting better with digital, especially is you are using the right settings on your digital camera. The setting you need to use is called Noise Reduction it might even refer to it as Long Exposure NR. This will allow the camera’s built in software to analyze the photo to find and remove any noise generated by the long exposure. What creates the noise? Some of it is dust on the sensor, some of it is guesswork, some of it could be created by the rounding error from low light exposure. So the Noise Reduction will look for suspect pixels and remove them. It works surprisingly well.

The method for turning this feature on will vary depending on your camera. On my small Sony digital point and shoot camera it is automatically turned on when manual exposure times get above 1 second. For my Nikon Digital SLR it is a feature that has to be turned on in a menu.

If you forgot to turn NR on all hope is not lost. Programs like Adobe Photoshop have a noise removal feature that can work some wonders on the digital noise. The setting I use in Photoshop is called Dust and Scratches and is under the pull down heading of Filters>Noise>. I set this to about 1-2 pixels. And you can preview the results.

Enjoy the stormy season, and stay safe. Keep your camera and yourself under a safe, dry place at a good distance.

Build your own Teleprompter. Now you can create videos just like the your favorite talking heads. Parts involve 2 pieces of wood, a piece of glass, some dark fabric and a laptop or flat panel monitor.

This project has been no out of pocket cost. FREE Teleprompter. Now if you want to get fancy, there are the links at the bottom of this post about the half-silvered mirror or if you don’t want to use a table to hold the simple prompter setup, there is a link for a design with a stand you can build or order.

Links

Free Prompting software for MAC – OSX or Windows.
Prompt!
http://www.movieclip.biz/prompt.html

Website for Windows Internet Explorer
http://www.cueprompter.com/

Half-Silvered Mirrors and Kit for Full Size Standing Prompter
http://www.telepromptermirrors.com/