HD HTPC Partslist

So I settled on the parts list for the new HD HTPC. For the moment it will exist without an actual HD or Blu-Ray drive in it, as I have a Blu-Ray drive in my PS3 and feel no burning desire to spend money on a second one just for the sake of having it. I've been buying Blu-Ray discs so I have no HD discs, so paying a premium for an HD disc drive isn't a high priority either. nevertheless, the unit will be arriving in a few days and we can start assembling it.

Note: these links are to the Newegg site where I purchased them from. One can argue the point that a few bucks could be saved by buying pieces from various shops, but I have a good history with Newegg and that counts for something.

• Motherboard: Abit AN-M2HD Motherboard with native HDMI and video
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor3.2Ghz dual core processor
• 2GB of RAM
• LIAN LI PI-V350A Minitower MicroATX case
• Athena Power 400WT power supply
• Assorted minor parts
• One 500GB drive
  
  The case:
  

I looked at a wide range of cases in the form and style of AV equipment. If our equipment were in the theater room, I'd have placed a premium on it's visual fit into the room. But in fact the equipment racks for the theater is actually 2 rooms away in a utility room, so appearance was less critical to me than being able to easily work with the components. Given the relative difficulty of adding extra cards to theater form factor cases, I chose the mini-tower. It will sit on the rack beside our Network Attached Storage device, a 2 TerraByte Buffalo TerraStation Pro 2.

My wife's work is all digital and we need a rock solid backup of everything, so the 2 TB raid 5 array made a lot of sense for us for several reasons. The net yield is approximately 1.4TB after the RAID 5 overhead.

The partslist above isn't bleeding edge in any way. None of the parts (outside of the motherboard) are really hot stuff or super powerful. But for the task desired, they can do the job (or so we hope). We have a variety of extra(meaning old) hard drives lying around, but I kind of hate to build a brand new system on 2 year old hard drives. Instead I just merge the stack of older drives into arrays in one case and add them as more network storage to hold movies for the theater. In a few days we'll know if the idea of a under $600 HD HTPC actually works.

IR Converted -vs- Color Camera Samples

While I was taking pictures during the holidays, I managed to get a shot of this colorful rocking horse in both color with a Nikon D80 and with the IR converted Canon G9. It makes for an interesting comparison of the way that IR cameras see a color scene.

First, let's look at the scene in color:

Then the IR version of the same scene:

One of the big differences is the red lettering along the bottom gliders, which of course the IR camera sees as white. the shadows along the neck and legs are also much more distinct in the IR, showing the lines of the horse much better.

Next we have the color horse shot converted to black and white using a standard Photoshop conversion:

The B&W conversion has a greater fidelity as it does not lose the red details, but the IR shot has a distinct appearance that is more striking and whimsial. It is this whimsical, angelic quality that drew me to IR.

HTPC for High Def

For the past 2 years, I've run an old HP desktop of ours as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). It's been great and we love having it. But over time, I've often wished that it was a bit better than the old system that it is. Specifically I wish it had better sound for our theater room and supported HD.

When we moved to Georgia 2 years ago, we set aside one room in the house, a 14 by 17 foot room as a home theater room. Our one lavish overindulgence in the new house was to build out this room with a 120 inch HD projection system and surround sound. It's bee a real pleasure to have and since we built it, we've gone out to the movies twice and have been disappointed both times. Largely due to the poor sound at theaters where volume is used to cover up poor quality.

Recently I was poking around the NVIDIA website looking at some drivers and I stumbled across information abut NVIDIA motherboard HDMI support. Ok, so um... wow.

Why is this a wow? Well, HTPC support for High Def formats is severely lacking. You need the right chipset on the motherboard, the right drivers, the right CPU to crank out all of that decoding to process the HD signal, and a video card that can push HDMI. All together it is very, VERY costly to build a HD capable HTPC that can do it right. What's new and different about these motherboards is that they take the vast bulk of the expense out of the equation.

I found the ABIT AN-M2HD version of the motherboard on Newegg for $90. This motherbaord can output HDMI natively, without the need to buy a $300+ video card to push the HD signal with. Now that's deal. I added in a case, 2 GB of memory, an AMD X2 6400 processor, a 500GB drive, DVD burner, Power Supply and some needed cables fr under $600 total order. With luck, it'll assemble in just a few hours of effort and testing and will come in far, far less than the $1,400 it would cost to build an HD HTPC using a conventional motherboard price as of last time I checked parts)

The other great thing about these motherboards is that they have an integrated on-chip HDCP key (High Definition Content Protection) so that when I toss in a blu-ray and HD drives, the signal can be properly processed by the new system and displayed in full High Def glory on our screen. For those wondering what this means, new HD standards include copy protection built into every components that can play HD signals, from the Blu-Ray player to the TV and even the cables between them. Using the wrong parts anywhere along the way in the chain can prevent your system from being able to properly play copy protected content. While your home movies won't have copy protection, your Bu-Ray or HD discs will, as may any of the potential movie download services that are just starting to come into maturity.

When the hardware arrives, I'll post up the details and assembly notes.

Interesting Series of Videos on Digital Photography

There's a very interesting series of videos on VieoJug that cover a wide range of photography topics. Click over and take a look, some great pointers for new photographers and reminders for the experienced.

Graveyard in Infrared

On the way back from the waterfall, I stopped by an old roadside graveyard. I've developed a certain fascination on these roadside graveyards recently. I may wind up starting to collect shots from various ones in the region. No idea why, it's just this urge I have.

I didn't take any reference shots on those, so I only have the Infrared shots to show. All of these were with white balance set to the same forest green that's been doing so well for me when shooting outdoors with the Infrared camera. All of these shots, except where noted on the last one, are just as they came out of the camera, no tweaking.

What's making this a lot more fun than I expected is that the converted Canon G9 lets me take IR snapshots with the speed and ease of a conventional camera. Whereas each particular desired shot would have taken a half hour of trial and error with a conventional digital camera and an IR filter, these are basically point and shoot so I get to collect a large number of sample shots.

Here are a few basic shots that came out of about 10 minutes of running around the graveyard basically just snapping shots of everything in sight. In several cases, I manually dialed in some quick exposure bracketing just to be sure I got something usable. One of the challenges of shooting like this is that it's hard to know what's going to be really interesting until you get it back to your computer and see what the color scales really turned out like. The best part of digital is that essentially it's free, so take as many pictures as you feel like and sort them out afterwards. What turns out well is kind of surprising.

I started by just shooting several of the larger markers and trying to get some background and some sky into each shot to give it some range for the camera to play with for how it would attempt to treat the shots as color photographs.

After those, I started looking around for some shots to try and work in the rows of more conforming markers. But this is a very old graveyard and placement is somewhat irregular. Nevertheless, it made for some interesting shots:

Last, I took one shot and spent some time tweaking it, adjusted contrast, bit of a diffused blur and give it a slightly ghostly feel. Currently this is serving as my new desktop wallpaper.

Infrared Shots at Amicalola Falls

Well the weather was terrible Saturday, rainy and cold, so I stayed in. But I got out on Sunday to take some test shots. It was fairly cold out, 36 at home at noon time. I headed out Amicalola Falls to see about getting some shots to see what we could capture. By the time I'd reached the top of the falls on it's mount, it was down to well under 35. Even with gloves on and taking them off only long enough to adjust camera settings and various details, I rather quickly lost feeling in my fingers. We had very light snowflakes for most of the time I was there. After the first hour, I had nothing but constant pain below the knuckles of each hand so I packed up and headed back a bit before I'd have liked. But still, managed to get some shots that show what the camera can do.

This is a very simple shot with a Nikon D80 as a reference shot for the scene.

Then I set up the Infrared camera to see what it would show me. This is with a basic forrest green card used for the white balance.Here's the same one with the R/B channels switched.

I'm not sure if this was a typical example, but I seemed to have a much easier time getting an exposure balance with the IR shots than the normal shots. On the normal shots the lighting difference between the waterfall at the bottom of the frame and the sky at the top were too many stops apart to get any one shot that had detail in both. But with the IR converted Canon G9 it was fairly easy.

One thing I'll say abut the G9, the way it shows the picture on the back on the 3 inch screen is pretty nice. The display is adjusted to your expose settings. So as you dial in aperture or shutter speed, it adjusts the display to show you pretty much exactly what you are going to get. This has made it a lot more fun to go through the steps of learning what IR can do.

Conversely the G9 has it's downside. The noise level of the pictures is enough to have taken me back when I saw the first ones. I shot everything on this trip at the lowest ISO it supports (ISO 80) and it's much better. But even shooting at 400 I saw a lot more noise in the pictures that I'd like to ever see. Now granted, this might be part of the nature of converting to IR, I'm no expert. But even reviews in various places like DPReview said that it showed more noise than they were happy with. Being as my goal is almost entirely outdoor shots, I should be OK with sticking to the lower ISO. It's also worth noting that I have the Noise Reduction settings on the camera turned off. I can do noise reduction in Photoshop, so I'd like the originals to be as unaltered by the camera as possible.

On the way back from the falls, I stopped by a small roadside graveyard. I'll confess that over the past year I've developed a certain fascination with wanting to shoot pictures of the graveyards. I'll get those uploaded tomorrow.

The Infrared Camera is Here

So the Infrared Converted Canon G9 came in, and I've started testing around with it some.

First the reference pic of what the house looks like on normal film...

Here's a quick pic of our house from the new camera...

Here's the same shot with the red and blue channels reversed so that the sky winds up the more normal blue instead of red.
Tomorrow I plan to get out and take more shots with the new camera, and soon I'd like to do some that illustrate various white balance options and their effects.

The white balance on the IR shots above shot was set to a deep green from a color card I had prepared ahead of time. That's why the tree and bushes wind up being nearly white. It's winter and the grass is in hibernation so it's not green to begin with ;)

Just Because It's a Cat

Perhaps my single favorite picture of our cat Darwin:
This is back when he was so young that his ears were bigger than his head:

And some others

Halloween 07

Finally got around to transferring some photos from Halloween. We tend to decorate for Halloween as much as, if not more than for Christmas. The first shot is from right at dusk, using a tripod and about a 4 second exposure so that even though it's close to being dark out, the picture looks fairly light, and yet the brighter lights easily show up:

This one was taken just after dusk for more dramatic lighting:

Theme Paintball

While waiting for the IR camera, I thought I'd toss up a few pics from a recent event I was invited to. A group in North Georgia hosts these massive scenario paintball games. They have a 75 acre area set up with bases, trails, "tanks", target sets like communication centers, the works. The paintball games last for up to 48 hours sometimes.

The fun part is that they occassionally have have theme scenarios, and this was was a fun topic, Aliens versus Predators versus Marines. Each team had different rules of conduct, different mechanisims to score points and diferent victory conditions. It was a pretty fun time for all.

I was there to get some fun pictures of the event and lucked out when some folks showed up fully dressed up for the event, such as:

I then took that shot and worked on it a while in PhotoShop and came up with some wallpaper for the paintballers to download:

The paintball game was a blast for all, and held a special moment when Boy met Predator.

The rest of the scenario pictures are here. You may or may not notice that exposures during the matches were less than optimal or well balanced. With 100 people shooting in/at/near/around you, and wearing a full head paintball helmet, and having subjects that refuse to stay still for more than half a second before they run off, you start taking any shot of opportunity you get and let the camera meter itself.

And on a side note, when 100 people show up for a massive paintball game in Georgia, everyone covered head to toe with padding, gear, fatigues, etc. I just have to wonder what this guy was thinking...

Picking a Camera for Infrared Conversion

First of all, it's worth asking why one would want to convert a digital camera to InfraRed? We can buy IR filters for virtually any SLR lens for as little as $60 in some cases. Why spend more to permanently convert a camera?

Digital cameras use a sensor, the electronic part that replaces the traditional film as the spot where your lens focuses light for presentation and capture inside of your camera. Unfortunately, digital sensors are sensitive to IR light just as they are sensitive to "normal" visible light. This means that they would normally record every image with a red/pink cast as the IR light is merged with the normally visible light. To prevent digital cameras from universally producing pink tinted photos, they have an IR blocking filter installed inside the camera when you buy it. This lets the camera take the pictures that we expect from our normal cameras.

You can put an IR filter on your lens and take IR pictures on many(most) digital cameras. But since they also have that internal IR blocking filter, very little IR gets through. This means that you wind up shooting pictures, even on a sunny day, that have shutter speeds over a full second, often much slower. While this puts inexpensive IR photography within reach of most digital SLR owners (all you need is your camera, an IR filter, and a tripod) the slow speeds make it difficult to work with. As an added challenge, you cannot view through the lens on your SLR to compose the shot while the filter is on, and in-camera metering is essentially useless.

The IR conversion process is basically the act of opening up the camera and removing that built-in filter that blocks most of the IR light from reaching the sensor. It also can require adjustments to the metering and focus settings in the camera to compensate for the changes.

After reading up on several services that offer IR conversions, and seeing posts of happy customers in some blogs, I decided upon LifePixel to convert the camera I would be using.

The upside of converting an SLR are fairly obvious. Higher quality camera, variety of lenses, generally greater features in the cameras, etc. Essentially all of the same reasons one would choose an SLR over a compact camera to begin with. But compacts have their advantages too.

When using a compact camera, the focus adjustment aspect of IR photography is removed from the equation. No more adjusting focus settings manually to compensate. It's just a minor nuisance, but it's still a factor.

The other benefit of using a compact camera is potentially huge. I use Nikon digital SLRs, and while some other brands may have live viewing on the screen, my Nikons do not. (The new D3/D300 series is adding this but that's far outside my price range for this project). What this really means to me is that I'd be able to get a better view of the way the final shot will look while viewing the rear LCD, something I could not accomplish on my SLRs.

My goal with IR photography is to enjoy taking them, have fun with the pictures in my digital darkroom, and if I ever become so lucky, to sell a few to stock houses. Being as fun and accessibility are my key goals, I decided on a compact camera for sheer ease of use. Also, it's far cheaper than buying a fully featured SLR to send in for conversion. Sending an older SLR wasn't my preference as I wanted something with at least 10MP.

The last part of the equation is something I had to take a leap of faith on. How a specific camera reacts to IR photography in color mode.

Every camera has different color handling firmware in it. Simply put, this is the software that decides how the digital sensor interprets the images it sees into color photographs. Some software reacts well to IR images in color mode, and some do not. The perk of capturing the images in color mode instead of the camera's B&W mode, is that you can get some stunning images as a result of the camera's color software struggling to make sense of the IR images. The sample page at LifePixel has some great side by side comparisons that show how this effect works.

I looked through a wide range of compact digital cameras, scanning every brand and type I could fine for nearly 2 weeks. In the end I chose the Canon G9 for several reasons:

1. Raw file support
2. Custom White Balance (essential for IR, we'll get into this another day)
3. 12.1MP
4. Large 3 inch rear LCD for previewing pictures.

You can read more about the camera at the Digital Photography Review website's G9 Review. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for info on specific cameras.

Unfortunately this last part will be a bit of a leap of faith for me. The G9 is brand new out on the market and I've been unable to locate any IR images captured through a G9. The shots I've seen from a G7 looked good, but that's not a guarantee. I'll post up some IR shots from it as soon as I get the chance.

So I purchased a G9 from Adorama (If I'd looked around I might have been able to save a few bucks elsewhere, but these guys consistently do well by me, including during a shipping SNAFU they paid to overnight me a lens I needed the next morning. I admit, I'm brand loyal when someone puts effort into providing me with good service.).

When it t arrived a few days later and I then shipped it off to LifePixel for conversion. It should be delivered back to me later today, and I'll continue with details when it's here.

My First Photos

Back in the '80s I was stopping by my then girlfriend's office to pick her up for lunch. It was a little local beach newspaper that published weekly. As I walked in, I could see the editor, who fit the proverbial "old battleaxe" description to a T, in an argument with the head photographer. (Well, saying "head" photographer is being kind. He was the only photographer, it was just a little local weekly after all.) The argument ended with what would become Trump's famous tagline years later: "You're Fired!"

Sweeping out of her office, her royal majesty demanded of the newsroom "OK, who is going to be my new photographer?"

In the stunned silence of the room, my girlfriend literally reached over and raised my arm and said "He'll do it!" That I neither owned, nor knew how to use a camera was no deterrent to these two women, one of whom I'd thought I trusted up until that point.

It wasn't until much later that I learned to get past the stern exterior and came to truly enjoy my editor. She had enough character for any three normal people you meet.

The following week I found myself employed, and standing in the office of the Photo Editor of the city newspaper, (the real daily paper, not the local weekly) to get the crash course in news photography. As it turns out the city newspaper was owned by the same company that owned most of the local weekly papers and did their print runs during downtime between daily press runs. So training new folks for the weekly locals fell upon the staff at the main newspaper.

Two days later, armed with too much information to fit into my head in such a short time, a Pentax camera that may in fact have been older than I was, and a real feeling of being out of my element, I arrived back at the beach newspaper, ready to make every possible mistake.

A few months later, after shooting hundreds of rolls, hand developing all of my own film as well as that of everyone else that worked there, I'd managed to figure out what was going on for the most part. I read every book I could get my hands on and took a proper photography course to boot.

The technical aspects of developing B&W were easily overcome, at least to the standards of a newspaper. I learned to push and pull film, dodge and burn prints ( I did this far far too much at first due to my stunningly poor knowledge of properly exposing the pictures to begin with).

I enjoyed my stay as a photographer. Racing about town, covering news stories ranging from political campaigns and local Rotary clubs to sporting events and tragic local events. It was a pretty decent way to get to see another side of the world that most folks get to skip over. But it's not something I'd want to do for very long. Taking a lot of pictures can be fun, but driving all over town to take pictures of stuff that was of little personal interest can get old fast.

Later on, I worked at a one hour photo for a few years, and that's where I became tired of pictures. It was a resort island in Florida, Sanibel Island. Surrounded by beauty, tropical weather and relaxed people on vacations, I somehow got burnt out on photography. If I had to look at one more set of vacation photos, badly shot sunsets or poorly lit family photos, I'd be ready to carve out my eyes with a mellon baller.

It wasn't until many years later, when I was married and had things in my life worth appreciating and saving, that I thought about owning a camera again and started wanting to take pictures again. I got a new Nikon D80 digital camera and went wild with taking photos. Family, local landscapes and waterfalls, some local events for fun. Being a professional geek (that's how I often reply when asked what I do for a living, as it's more easily understood than describing my actual job) I have some decent photo editing tools at my disposal, and I became even more interested in the digital darkroom and what I could possibly do for fun, and maybe even a smidgen of profit if I happened to get lucky.

That's when I decided to really try out infrared photography. I'd dabbled and played around with it at various times, but it was prohibitively tedious and difficult to work with, so I'd never been able to get very far with it. Digital cameras changed all of that.

I've taken the steps to acquire an infrared digital camera and what I'll do in the following series of posts is to discuss how it works, what I learn and what I wish I'd known before I started. In short, I hope to write the blog that I wish I could have read when I first started thinking about getting into infrared photography.

Click to continue

I suspect that like the vast majority of blogs, this one will exist in complete obscurity. But my interest in seeing what goes into one of these is enough to drive me to try it out anyway.

I was a hyperactive child, and as an adult that has been an underlying component of who I am. I tend to get completely immersed in some skill, topic or challenge, and my obsession generally drives me to become somewhat adept at it. Then just as quickly, something shiny will distract me and I'm off into a new obsession and the previous fascination gets dropped like a hot potato.

Some of what I run into is that as I find new obsessions and get involved in research on them, I find a lack of certain kinds of details regarding the various topics. These are generally details that would have been important to me and which I could discover only via trial and error.

So I thought to myself, why not start jotting some of these down? If it helps anyone else out there, it's worth the effort.