Canon Hacks!

[Cody]

I have been wanting to try and do some time-lapse photography lately. We are growing pole beans and they seem to grow as much as half an inch an hour. This seemed to be the perfect candidate for such a thing....

Unfortunately, Canon saw fit to not include the time-lapse feature of my PowerShot S5IS. Obviously the camera is more than capable of doing this, so that was rather irritating to find out I couldn't do it. And so to Google I went and found an awesome 'hack' called CHDK. Apparently this program stores itself in the temporary memory or something and allows you to perform a bunch of things the camera otherwise doesn't let you do. One of which is obviously time-lapse. You turn the camera off and away the program goes. It's actually pretty neat.

On the down side, I need a power adapter to plug into my camera.... Running for hours and taking pictures isn't going to happen on batteries! I am hoping I can find one and test this out.

Cool stuff.

[Nick]

Yeah, that stuff is cool. I installed it on mine a few whiles back.

I don't see why Canon would remove the intervalometer feature. Mine has it and I think some of the older ones did, so it's not like they would have to develop it anew :/ Not that its a complicated feature.

But yeah, CHDK is cool. It can be used to phtograph lightning or to create a trail-camera setup with its motion detection.

[Cody]

I've had time to mess with it a little, but not much. I tried out the motion detection feature and it is sooo sensitive that even something like the wind blowing the tree branches a little sets it off. As far as I can tell there is not options to adjust that. And sadly I still haven't gotten that power supply so I have not been able to do any time-lapse stuff.