Check out the gallery.

Playing dress up is so much fun.

The rest of the album is here.

     Our disappointment comes from the cucumber first, as it died quickly. It did die soon enough we were able to replace it rather quickly, but it still seems to be lacking in growth. The next problem is the sweet peas. They went a little more slowly, but despite our efforts to get them to grow on the supports, they withered and died.

     Being our first garden, this all comes as a great learning experiment, but many of the variables are still a mystery. Did we over water, or under water the sweet peas and cucumber? Don’t know for sure. Was the adjacent tree giving a little too much shade? We did trim it back but can’t really know now if that was a large factor.

     Anyway, we’re enjoying our garden very much and excited to see the corn and sunflowers getting tall and all the veggies maturing.

Unfortunately, the A640, and most other point-and-shoot cameras I’ve seen, don’t include any controls which allow you to set up timed or scheduled shutter releases.  Canon, however, does include software with the camera which allows you to release the shutter at a set interval.  Being the fan of Linux that I am, I hunted around a little and found that some nice folks have written some wonderful open-source software for controlling a whole host of different cameras.  “gphoto2″ allows remotely capturing from the camera and many other functions, as long as they are written into the camera’s SDK.

A project sprung up at work where I thought this might be useful.  A building project was just beginning and I sold my employer on setting up the camera for time lapse for some later marketing material.  Using an older PC, I installed Fedora 10 and installed the latest release of gphoto2 and the necessary requisite files.  Then I wrote a small perl script for capturing from the camera every half hour during the workday.

It’s still pretty rough but here it is if you’re interested…

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Program to capture an image from the camera and save it to local drive
# then upload it to specified folder on web/ftp server
# written by Paul Cushing
# pcushing@gmail.com

use Net::FTP;
use POSIX qw/strftime/;

########################################################################
#   Set variable here for script use

$ftp_server = "ftp.myserver.com";
$ftp_username = "joesixpack";
$ftp_password = "********";
$archive_dir = "htdocs/lapsephotos";
$htmllogfile = "lapselog.html";
$local_dir = "./";

########################################################################

########################################################################
#   Capture image from attached camera using gphoto2 and store it to
#   local image archive, naming it using the date/time

$photoname = strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M',localtime);     # create name from date
$photofile = "$photoname.jpg";                  # add jpg extension

#   use gphoto2 to grab image from camera
system("gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download --filename \"$photofile\"");

########################################################################

########################################################################
#   Upload photo to server via FTP

$ftp = Net::FTP->new("$ftp_server", Debug => 1)
or die "Cannot connect to hostname: $@";

$ftp->login("$ftp_username", "$ftp_password")
or die "Cannot login ", $ftp->message;

$ftp->cwd("$archive_dir")
or die "Cannot change working directory ", $ftp->message;

$ftp->binary();

$ftp->put("$photofile")
or die "Cannot upload $photofile", $ftp->message;

$ftp->quit();
########################################################################

The one problem I did run into, should you try something with a similar setup, is the usb automount in KDE.  When I insert the usb in the PC and turn on the camera, it initiates the automount for the camera which doesn’t allow the script to access the camera.  The solution was just to unmount the camera using the desktop icon before running the scripts.

I would have liked to pick up another A640 for the project but they seem to no longer be available.  Looking through Canon’s SDK listings, I found another camera that seemed to fit the bill.  The SX110IS is a 9 megapixel with a great 10x zoom lens and a beautiful three inch LCD screen.  The camera works with the script perfectly and the picture quality is great.

Unfortunately, that project has fallen through, but I’m sure we’ll use the setup on another project soon.  In the mean time, I love this camera for taking little shots here and there.  The 10x zoom is especially nice. My recent photos posted, the spider, and the cloud pictures were taken with the SX110IS.

I created this using photoshop from several photos I took from Eagle.  The sky was just a little stormy on the right.  I really love clouds.  They always remind my of how amazingly God is able to marry form and function.  The clouds are there for a purpose, carrying water around and all that, but they’re beautiful.  They also make me feel more like I’m a part of a giant earth.  I picture the satellite shots of clouds hovering just above the surface and then see myself standing there, really small, but a part of it all.