Back in April I decided to start a webcam project and gave myself an amazing budget of zero pounds. The objective is to capture outdoor images and one day compile them into a video to share. I’m now one and fifty image captures into the project and thought it was about time I wrote about it and my experiences.
My objectives for this project are:
- Firstly to capture the changes over a long period of time, show the seasons and perhaps changes not noticeable daily.
- This project being an introduction project to automated image capture. Seeing if I enjoy the project, what I learn and perhaps one day putting together a more expensive and comprehensive project.
Now as I had an outstanding budget of zero, there were obvious limitations. I don’t own any expensive webcam gear or have available boxes to make outdoor units. This project was put together with what I had lying around.
The Setup
So as you’ve probably guessed I plugged an old webcam into a computer. The computer itself isn’t dedicated to the task, so if I’m playing a high performance game I close the software. Every time the computer starts webcam software loads and captures an image, plus further images every thirty minutes the computer is on. The webcam itself was secured to a cpu bracket turned upside down and placed on a book.
I ran into expected limitations using cheap webcams. Other than adjusting the ‘nozzle’ of the webcam to improve general focus, the next step were drivers. I managed to find new drivers for my webcam. I discovered it was a rebranded webcam and even though the ‘rebranded seller’ didn’t have new drivers, the original manufacturer did.
Below are my settings for outdoor webcam image capture. Trying to take into account captures at anytime of the day, so not optimizied for one specific period. This means there will always be trade off in quality.
It’s a cheap webcam and the image was never going to be great. The are never going to be as good as a standalone digital camera.
For the actual image capture I’m using an impressive piece of free software called Yawcam. It is jam packed full of features. I configured it to load with a preview window, capture an image every thirty minutes to the local hard drive and chucked it into the Windows startup folder.
Problems
I noticed if I didn’t tell the yawcam preview window to load at startup a very dodgy pinkish image was captured. Also we have a lamp near the webcam and if it’s on during the night and the main light isn’t, again a bad image is taken. Plus as the webcam is not secured, then I expect movement over time.
Conclusion
One hundred and fifty images have already been captured and so far it’s interesting to watch the weather changes. As the webcam isn’t on 24/7 I’m missing out on the daylight cycles though. The image quality is extremely poor, especially as we are all used to high res images these days.
It has got me interested in putting together a image capture project with a budget! Especially with a more expensive capture device, possible a digital camera instead of a webcam. However for now I will leave this project running and perhaps one day will share here a video showing changing seasons.