Re: Digital Camera recommendations for coil photos

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <dhmccauley-at-spacecatlighting-dot-com>

As an amateur photographer who specializes lightning / storm photography. .
.

The first thing you really need to know is that you DON"T need an expensive
digital camera to take great photos of a tesla coil
in action.  I have about five digital cameras ranging from a inexpensive
KODAK DC4800 up to a very popular Canon G2 Powershot (which is an excellent
choice for a consumer digital camera) and finally a top of the line 6.5
Megapixel Canon Digital SLR which utilizes CMOS technology (read CMOS as
taking very long exposures with very low noise)  Anyways, any 3 Megapixel or
higher camera should provide you with excellent results.

Actually, the only one true feature you want is probably manual focus as
you'll be taking pictures in very dim light and autofocus cameras tend to
have difficulties focusing in these situations.

TAKING THE PICTURE

First, I think the biggest mistake almost every makes (including myself) in
taking photos of tesla coil is to just set the camera up and let the
exposure run for a long time (long time meaning more than 4 seconds)  There
is one inherent problem with this:

1.  When you take photos like this, you'll find on the long streamers that
as the streamer moves, you'll get a repro effect in that every single
streamer will appear to have 5+ identical streamers just copied on after
another.  This basically looks like crap.  For smaller coils, this is less
of a problem, but as the coils get bigger and the streamers get longer,
fatter, and last long, this becomes more of a problem.

Here is a good example of this occurring (this is a link to a picture of the
BIGGG Tesla Coil on Ross's O's website)

http://hot-streamer-dot-com/ross/Biggg/P1010070.jpg

Now with short exposures, there are basically two problems:

1.  You only capture maybe one streamer (which may or may not look okay -
sometimes a single thick streamers striking something turns out to be
extremely impressive)

2.  Exposure setting is very difficult to get correctly.  Since you are only
taking a shot for a very short duration of time, it will be difficult to
capture a good streamer and also have the rest of your coil appear correctly
illuminated in the shot at the same time.

THE SOLUTION

The solution for this is not to difficult.  Remember that as standard
photographers have a dark room where they manipulate their images, you now
have access to a digital darkroom which is your computer.  Software such as
Adobe Photoshop (or JASC's Paint Shop Pro which does EXACTLY all the same
features as Photoshop but only costs $79.00) are excellent choices for a
digital darkroom.

The technique for creating an awesome picture is basically this:

1.  Set your camera up in a bomb-proof location on a bomb-proof support.

2.  Capture a single good exposure of just the coil alone.

3.  Now run your coil, and take short exposures capturing as many "single
streamers" as possible.

4.  Once this is done, you basically combine all the photos you want to take
together and the results are just spectacular.  I'm currently working on the
photos I've taken from Ed Wingates huge magnifier and will post on my
website sometime soon as well as a "How To" article on how to do this with
both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro.  Stay tuned.

Finally, check out this recent lightning picture I took with my digital
camera.  Nows thats some serious power!!!

http://www.spacecatlighting-dot-com/danlightning01.jpg

"Captain Corona"



















> (Terry--I'm hoping this is a legitimate are of inquiry)
>
> Looking to buy a digital camera and one of most important criteria is the
> ability to take good shots of my coils in action.
>
> What are you using? Is the RF field cause problems? Good place to buy? I'm
> looking for close up capability so that I can take shots of my system
> components and share them with the group.
>
> Some of these dig cams have video clip capability. I wonder how this works
> for Coil vid clips?
>
> Dave
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