Photography – Demi's Brain Space

Take an old smartphone and dig inside to remove the IR filter on the camera(s). Then, once that’s done, find various filters and make a custom case so the filters can snap/screw on and off to do various levels of photography with ease. The better the smartphone camera, the harder it will likely be, but the better the camera the more you can do with it (night sky photos? time lapses? what more could be interesting to see in IR??)

Will probably need some sort of 3rd party app to capture from specific cameras or something like that (if there’s multiple) and maybe for manual focus control?

Also will probably want some sort of app to help play with/swap the various color channels of captured images.. Ideally can capture image in RAW and then have app the can play with RAW files.

The goal is to be able to take pictures like this without too much trouble:

There’s all sorts of various rigs used for night sky photography. Lots of knobs to turn to get the right exposure of the right parts of the sky, but a lot of the coolest pictures also have some foreground thing that is mostly dark but just illuminated enough to show you a bit if what it’s like to be there in person. I tried to do something like this in Joshua tree last time we were there with my phone flashlight. It kinda worked but it was basically impossible to tune and get right because reaction times and I had to be hold my phone so inconsistent angles were happening.

After literally zero research and only vaguely “over hearing” a conversation on an astrophotography channel of a slack group I’m in I had the idea to build an app for an android phone that basically has a tuneable flashlight timer. You’d be able to say “hey I want to flash my phone light for 0.08s this time” or like “flash for 0.1s wait 2sec and flash another 0.1s” or whatever schedule like that.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the lower bound but I think it can be relatively low and some phones (like mine) have multiple bright levels so that would be cool too.

then can setup phone on some consistent angle and stuff and maybe that’ll work.

yeah yeah I know that it’s maybe not gonna work.. my “overhearing” made it sound like consistent very low light is better than faster pulses of higher light but I think it’s worth a shot.. relatively low barrier to entry.