Jensen Beach, FL : Digital Camera Night Shots 

 

 

Click on image for a higher resolution image (1024 X 768)

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About the long Exposures:   The Olympus SP-500 lets you take pictures at up to 16 seconds exposure.  Noise reduction can also be enable which essentially subtracts the dark image.  What it does to reduce noise, is to take a second picture immediately after the first picture is taken, with the same exposure settings, except, this time the shutter never opens.  The resulting image is called the dark image, which can look quite colorful actually, depending on how noisy the sensors are.  Since the noise of a sensor at a given temperature is pretty constant, subtracting this image from the original image results in a final image with a lot less visible noise in the image.   This is what's done for each 16 second exposure, and in fact, since 2 pictures are taken, the whole process takes up to 40 seconds.

Image Stacking:  On dark nights with little light, a 16 second exposure is not long enough to obtain a decent image.  Taking multiple images, and then summing them up, can in effect, let you extend the exposure time of the image.  VM95 software (from EVS) lets you stack up to 18 images, and the results are often astounding. 

 

 

 

Viewing Tips for the EVS Movie/SlideShow:

  • Single Mouse Clicks Only!!  Multiple Clicking on slow connections (28.8 modem) can stall out the internet connection...system appears hung up. 

  • click on the image for the hi-resolution shot, it loads in a separate window which you can close or leave open

  • press the ">" button to play the images forward in time.  The first time you view them, the images must load, but then the images are in cache and the images will play quickly if you choose a small delay

  • use the ">|" and "|<" buttons to single step forward and backward through the images

  • click on "List" for a listing of all the images in the slideshow, you jump to any image just by clicking on it

  • choosing a delay of "0"  will play the images as fast as possible like a timelapse movie, forward or backwards

  • In your browser options or preferences, setting your cache to a large size (100 Megabytes for example) will improve the performance of the movie/slideshow

Difficulties Using the Movie/SlideShow

  • Use Single Clicks only!  Double clicking, for example, when viewing the List, will load the small image and also start loading the high res image.

  • Do not use the slide bar if you have a slow internet connection, it tries to load each image as you slide the bar, waiting for each image to load and thus can take forever to catch up to the slider location

  • On slow connections, large image sets will take quite a bit longer to load. A SlideShow with 2000 images must pre-load a text file with the list of the images that is about 200K bytes

About the Movie/SlideShow

This Movie/SlideShow is a Java Applet written expressly for EVS.  It was created out of the need to view a sequence of images rapidly, yet retain the ability to view each shot at high resolution.  The images can be played forward and backwards, with the option of skipping a preset number of images between each image, in order to facilitate viewing large image sets.  One feature of the EVS Movie/SlideShow is that it can handle over 3000 images.  Coupled with the List view, any browser has access to the complete image set, and any image at any time can be found with just a few clicks of the mouse.

About the WebCam

This WebCam uses the Kodak DC4800 3 megapixel digital camera for imaging.  A Windows 98 computer controls the camera and does automatic and unattended uploading to the Internet. For more information check out the web site at http://www.video-monitoring.com