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Re: coil photography
Original poster: "Jon Danniken" <danniken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
----- Original Message -----
Original poster: "Scott Bogard" <teslas-intern@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Greetings all,
I am having trouble getting good pictures of my Tesla coil in
operation. It seems the cameras I have available, do not have a
very adjustable exposure time (and I don't have any clue how to
take a double exposure, without using conventional film, which is
useless to me as I don't have a scanner, so I cannot put my
pictures on the computer). I can get "decent" videos, but still
shots captured from them generally only show the arcs, and not the
coil (which gives no perspective of actual size), plus the DPI is
too low for my taste anyway. Any suggestions would be appreciated
(even referrals to the archives would be great, if you could give
me a general place to look, they are vast, and I am pressed for
time!) Thanks a heap.
I used an older and relatively cheap digicam (HP r607) without manual
exposure setting, but got halfway decent pics. The trick is to use a
tripod, and make the camera use a long exposure by taking the picture
at night (do not use flash).
Basically, set everything up, turn off the lights, click the camera,
then run your TC for awhile. Play around with various settings to
get a good picture.
You can use photo manipulation software (Photoshop or GIMP, among
others) to make a composite image; this will give you the effect of
seeing the arcs against a lit TC.
For example, these are pics I took:
http://teslacoils.home.comcast.net/4.5Tesla.jpg
Pasting the image on the bottom right on the image on the left, then
using "Screen" blending gives this:
http://teslacoils.home.comcast.net/TeslaScreenComposite.jpg
Mind you, I spent all of about a minute making that, but if you work
on it a little bit you should be able to get better results.
Jon