For my submission to the photography competition I took a photo of the clouds, demonstrating how the automatic settings on the camera are very adaptable to varying light levels and still maintain good white balance. This was taken on the first sunny day of the year and is my little celebration that summer has finally arrived.
The photo is part of a series taken as a timelapse (using a simple python script) and then edited together on the Raspberry Pi using mencoder to make a short video. Frames were captured at a rate of 2 a minute:
I also caught a mighty fine sunset:
Here is a photo of the setup (not taken with the RPi camera board):
I used a 61 watt hour laptop battery pack to drive a Rev 1 Pi model B, with a WiPi dongle. With the camera active at 30 second intervals and the dongle unplugged I got around 30 hours of battery life, a couple hours less with Wifi active. I logged in using SSH and looked at the pictures via a SAMBA share of the Pi home directory to check the camera was aimed correctly.
To set the timelapse going I used the nohup command to keep the python script going after logoff, and appended an & to the end of the command to allow me to continue typing other commands into the console:
Finally if you wiggle the camera around too much the cable will become loose and generate errors, unplugging and re-plugging the ribbon connectors fixes this!
I also had some problems with a USB cable that dropped 0.25volts along its length which when running on battery caused crashes and card corruption, using a short high quality cable fixed that.