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Our first few stopmotion animation tests were successful. As per everything else we do, everything was done with Linux and freely available opensource software. In this case, gphoto2, imagemagick and mplayer (with ffmpeg thrown in for the .flv conversion for Gootube.

We used my Canon 350D mounted on a tripod with Adam’s fixed focal length 135mm lens, with fixed lighting and a green background for eventual chromakeying. There was a quick hack involved getting gphoto2 to immediately spit out a photo, instead of trying to logically process it, which was solved with:

gphoto2 --set-config "Capture size class"="Full Image" --capture-preview --filename "${OUTPUTFILE}" --force-overwrite

(If you choose to try this, remember that whatever format you set your camera to will be the format that it comes out in, so don’t set it to RAW unless you really don’t value your time and want to have to convert it using dcraw.)

The first video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5t_IRIf58.

I took Stan up to Crystal Lake, where he had a great time swimming and doing whatever it is that dogs do. Some pictures:

Tasha and I went down to a horse farm in Hebron, CT, and took a bunch of pictures. I’m trying to get her to open her own flickr account… It was a good day, all in all, even though a few of the horse riders there got a little antsy with us taking their pictures.

Finally got my camera in the mail, and now all I seem to be doing is taking pictures of *everything*. As soon as I get back into the swing of taking pictures with a decent camera, I’ll post some more pictures to the photography section…