I’ve dabbled in macro photography for a number of years, most recently I’ve taken to spiders, insects and other tiny creatures as my main focus. It’s a great way to take yourself out of the world for a moment, and visit someplace completely alien. With the advent of really nice digital cameras, it’s also cheap entertainment..};^)

(After the the camera itself has been depreciated over a few thousand photos).

Many insects have the decency to pose for photos in the great (and generally well-lit) outdoors, like the fellow pictured above.

This is not always the case, however. Every so often a photogenic creature wanders into the house, in the shade, at night. Using the built in flash (I’m using a Nikon Coolpix 5700) gives acceptable results, but often, as pictured below, the really small critters get lost in the shadow cast by the camera’s own lens. See the picture below.

I recently received a small, high-output flashlight [G2 Nitrolon] as a gift. It has a halogen bulb, runs on a pair of Lithium batteries, and is very, very bright. I have tried using this as a lighting instrument for macro photography, but it is extremely awkward to hold the flashlight in one hand, the camera in the other and coordinate their movements.

The only successful test was made with an extra set of hands. But it is tough (not to mention socially unacceptable) to pack an extra set of hands in your camera bag …or is it?

This can mean only one thing: Project!

The goal is to build a small rig that screws into the tripod mount on the bottom of the camera. It has a flexible armature that can be bent into position to point a mounted flashlight where needed to light a macro photo.

Gathering the Materials

I had almost everything I needed lying around the house. Your mileage and actual materials may vary, as the content our junk boxes may differ. I suggest reading the project description all the way through, and then substituting parts as fits your situation.

• Tripod with broken leg, check.
• Old pill bottle, check.
• Hose from useless exercise-ball foot-pump, check
• Fairly stiff but bendable wire…hmmm.

The wire was a lucky find. I was at the craft store stocking up for another project, and I stumbled across "armature wire." This is thick wire made of soft aluminum. It’s used to make a skeleton for sculptural projects, but it is the perfect material for the boom arm, stiff, but easily bent into position. As an added bonus, it is actually designed to be frequently bent and rebent, so it should last for a while without breaking. It is approximately 1/8th inch in diameter.

Again: read through the project first. I had to make some mid-course corrections, so don’t follow this step by step.

Let’s get to it!

Wired online recently had a nice article on the effects work behind the upcoming Matrix sequel. There was an amazing amount of data collected in a variety of ways to capture the actor’s digital performances*.

This was the spark for this little foray into home-brew imaging technology.

At some point I’d like to build a 3D Scanner, but I figured I’d start more modestly and try to build a workable home solution for getting a usable unwrapped image of a person’s head.

There have been some interesting deviations from that initial goal, but the road has been fun to travel.

First Try in Two Parts

I have a bunch of imaging devices lying about, but for this experiment I focused on two. Contestant number one is an old flatbed scanner that has been gather dust due to it’s slow scan speed and marginal image quality. Contestant number two hails from Kodak, a sassy little 2 megapixel EasyShare camera that we bought for my wife’s trip to New Zealand.

The image above [Link] is the initial scanner test. The scanner is unaltered, and I am manually turning a standard Halloween styrofoam skull, trying to track with the moving scan head. Not bad.

The image below [Link] surprised me. It’s the same skull, sitting on a little Lego turntable. I took several images, and stitched them together by hand. It worked out quite well. I’ll talk more about how it was created a little later.

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Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Scientist

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, " Song of Myself "

You see, I have projects. They come upon me unbidden, as my sweet wife knows too well. And then come the drills, duct tape, Lego, sculpey, magnets and dare I say it, lasers…the list is delimited only by the bounds of necessity.

These projects span the gamut from mechanical engineering to molecular biology, imaging technology to home decorating. Like I said, unbidden. So faced with a genetic predisposition to mad scientism, I decided it was either share the fruits of my tinkering on the web site, or build a secret base inside a volcano and work on world domination. As the current housing bubble* has made secret island bases prohibitively expensive**, I’ve chosen the former.

So let’s stroll by Chrome Cow Labs and see what’s cooking.

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	A Macro Lighting Rig The built-in flash on my camera doesn’t really work well for macro photography. Take a high-output halogen flashlight, add a few bucks worth of supplies, and you get a lightweight rig for lighting macro photos [ Link ]
	The Rotisserie Scanner What do you get when you cross a scanner with some serious Lego construction? A curiously eccentric cylindrical scanner. What happens when the scanner ends up on the front page of Slashdot? 33 gigs of transfer, 1.2 million hits and all sorts of fun. [Link]
	Desktop 3D Scanner from Common (Geek) Household Supplies The next step in rotisserie scanning: Actual 3D scanning. Using cheap re-purposed tech, I hope to build functional 3D scanner capable of digitizing objects several inches in height. [Link]

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* I wrote this 3 years ago. Pop already!
** It’s actually not true. You can get some "fixer-upper" islands for less than a house in Boston. Volcano not included.

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