camera gun mount

[Jon]

I wasn't sure if I should post this under "hunting equipment" or "photography"- so I'll just post it here.

I got a new gun, actually one of Ted's old ones, and decided to work on my idea for a camera mount again. I wasn't really interested in shooting pictures of fish as I acutally shot them. I was interested in taking pictures of the fish that aren't legal to shoot in our state.

I decided to start out simple and add on to it from there as I see fit. I put I bolt straight through the butt of the the gun and screwed my housing onto the top of it. I used a backwards facing wingnut to lock it in place.

Here's how she looks so far.

Jon

 

[Jon]

This is a close-up shot of the bolt and camera. I can actually sight down the barrel through the viewscreen on the back of my digital camera.

Jon

 

[Jon]

Here's a shot of it from the front.

Jon

 

[Jon]

This is one last shot of the mount from the back.

I thought that it would work out really nice for me since I shoot my speargun with my left hand, I'm a south-paw, and my camera with my right-hand, since that's how all cameras are made.

After using it in the water I found out that the camera was too far back on the butt. My gun is so short, due to the water we dive in around here, that I couldn't mount it any more forward than it was. This caused a problem when I was loading the bands on my gun. I put the butt onto my chest pad and proceeded to bend my camera mount, but didn't hurt my housing at all.

I am now thinking of a few different ideas to improve it.

1- Put an added butt pad onto the back of my gun to take care of
the overlap caused by the camera housing.

2- Mount the camrea in the back, but off to the side by fixing a plate to the butt end of the gun. This would keep the butt end totally free to loading it.

3- Move the camera up closer to the trigger assembly and mount it on the right hand side by means of a bar that attaches to the bottom of the barrel. The only thing that worries me with this idea is that it might interfear with my line.

Any other ideas are always welcome.

Jon

 

[Jon]

I did get to used it today and took a picture of this nice walleye, which we are NOT allowed to shoot in my state.

This is what the mount is really intended for. When I dive I see lots of fish that I can't shoot and a few that we can. Since I am down there anyways, I want to be be to do something. I saw some really nice game fish the last two times we were out and could never get to my camera quick enough to take a picture of them- I used to keep my camera clipped off to my float. With the camera mounted right to the gun I shoudn't miss too many shots- with the camera anyways.

Wood guns are so much easier to customize in this way. I had thought about doing this to my R.A., but just couldn't think of an easy way to accomplish it.

Jon

 

[fuzz]

Nice shot!

From your picture, would have thought that the barrel/shaft would be in your picture - do you swivel it?

I put your pic in photoshop & used auto-levels to spit this out:

 

[Jon]

I just zoomed in the lens so you couldn't see the barrel or shaft.

Jon

 

[JMD]

I was watching a terry maas video the other night and it looked like the were mounting the video cameras at the front of the barrel. Probably easier to do with a video camera tho as you never have to trigger it to take a picture...

 

[Adrian]

Nice, Jon!

So that's what a walleye looks like. Is there any way you could have the base (what holds the camera to the shaft) be some sort of slot-holder, so when loading the gun you can just slip the camera in and out of the slot? Or without having to take the camera completely off, just push it further forwards and then back into the proper position after loading.

Adrian

 

[unirdna]

Hey Fuzz,

I've used Irfanview for most of my 'color level' work because it is so darn idiot-proof. I've recently acquired Photoshop Elements and have been having some success (albeit time comsuming) with the panorama and a few other features. I've been keeping up with audio/video software since everything was a big, fat MPEG1, but was always scared off from the graphics stuff because Adobe was always too complicated for my ADD brain.

Anyway, I noticed that you used something called 'auto-levels' to 'fix' the color of that photo. The 'auto' part makes my eyebrow raise :hmm. I've been able to achieve similar results with irfanview, but had to spend a lot of time monkeying with the bars. Did you just click a button and "vwalla"?

I wonder if my dumbed down version has this feature.....

Ted

*attachment*
I did this in a couple seconds using the color bars on irfanview. Not bad, but isn't as crisp at the photoshop photo. Also, not every photo is as simple to manipulate as this one. Some take many tries.

 

[Jon]

I use the same Irfanview program that Ted has.

I just went a little higher on the blue, and hit the auto sharpen button, to enhance this shot.

The program is really easy to use as I have yet to make the jump to photoshop. It's also free, compared to the hundreds of dollars that photoshop costs.

Jon

 

[fuzz]

I used an archaic copy of Photoshop 5 which I got for dirt cheap($20) since I can't have illegal software on my work laptop

Can't remember the exact command(on a different laptop - have 5 for work), but it is a 1-click autolevel adjustment that adjusts for color & contrast levels.

Often the auto-level function "over-corrects" so I have gotten much better at manually adjusting the levels, but it is rather time-consuming. I usually auto-adjust to see the potential of a given photo then work from there.

 

[fuzz]

Originally posted by unirdna

Anyway, I noticed that you used something called 'auto-levels' to 'fix' the color of that photo. The 'auto' part makes my eyebrow raise :hmm. I've been able to achieve similar results with irfanview, but had to spend a lot of time monkeying with the bars. Did you just click a button and "vwalla"?

I wonder if my dumbed down version has this feature.....

With our recent business mergers I have a million projects to attend to... what do I do? I downloaded the trial version of Elements to play with :head

Ted, in Elements go into the Enhance menu at the top of the screen - there's an option called Auto Levels That's what I used. You could also use the shortcut "shift+ctrl+L"

Another option if you want to keep the ambiance of the green water you dive in is to just use the "auto color correction" function (ctr+shift+b). This will give you a little mellower transition:

 

[Frank O'Donnell]

Since we're messing with Jon's walleye, I thought I'd add my cut.

I opened it in Photoshop 7 and initially tried the "auto-level" button, and came out with a result very similar to Fuzz's initial version.

Then I opened it and manually adjusted the levels for each of the red, green and blue channels to bring the high and low ends of each to the edges of the histogram. This is more similar to Fuzz's second version, though a skosh different.

As a final step I almost always apply some sharpening with Photoshop's unsharp mask. Maybe 5% of pictures actually look worse when you do this, but the great majority look, well, sharper. I did include sharpening on this one.

 

[Jon]

camera gun 2.0

I made a slight modification to my orginal mounting system to accomodate loading the bands on the gun.

Here's what it looks like from the side.

Jon

 

[Jon]

cameragun 2.0

Here's a shot from the back. I just added on one of my camera trays from my film camrea system to use as a bracket to hold the camera off to the side. I know it has an angle to it, but that's all I have for now. If it works I'll look on E-bay for a flat one.

You can see that it is easily detached, by the wing nut, underwater so I can remove it from the gun and, safely:blackeye , take pictures of my buddies.

Jon

 

[Jon]

cameragun 2.0

One last shot from the "working end".

Unfortunatly, it looks like were going back into the deep freeze around here for the next couple of weeks, so I don't know when I 'll get a chance to try it out.

jon

 

[Jon]

camera gun 3.0

I think I, finally, have this thing worked out.

I had a freind machine a mount that would allow me to adjust the bar, a little, to make sure everything lined up how I wanted it to. I also can run the camera with my right hand while shoot the gun with my left- this isn't a problem since I am left-handed to begin with.

The top rows show details of the gun mount system and the bottom rows are some 'action' shots I pieced together.

I set my digital camera, Olympus 5050, into video mode when stalking/shooting. I then went back and pulled some stills off of the video. Since this is asking a lot out of a digital still camera I wouldn't call it magazine quality, however the movie clips look pretty good. Maybe one day I'll be able to get a real video camera to mount on the gun, but for now I have lots of flexability for what, and how, I shoot.

Jon

 

[Jon]

Here's a better view of that last row of pic's- where I tagged the carp.

Jon

 

[rigdvr]

SWEET! Gotta mount mine like that...