Digital Rebel!

Digital Rebel!

I recently purchased the Canon 400D (or US name – Digital Rebel XTi – which sounds heaps cooler). I took this on a hike to cradle mountain and it turned out some stunner photographs (like the photo of Barn Bluff shown right)

Having said that there are two things I’m looking at making to supplement it.

- A remote shutter control (either wired – very easy, or wireless – a little pricier). This seems pretty simple from some schematics shown around on the web and should mean that I won’t introduce ‘shakes’ to the camera when taking pictures.

- Some method of tagging GPS coordinates with the camera. I recently saw on the Nikon DSLR cameras which had a ‘shoe’ the GPS could mount on to perform this function – as yet it doesn’t seem Canon offer this functionality. One method would be to remove the memory card (CF in this case) and plug it into a writer each time the GPS tags are to be added – this wouldn’t be too hard, but is more than a tad inconvenient. Another method would be to interface a microcontroller with the USB interface. One problem here is the 400D doesn’t seem to allow Windows to mount the memory card directly, but rather uses a WIA protocol, which on the outset seems to be mainly one 1 – Doh!

Possibly I will just have to do it in software back on the computer for now – an activity which seems to be gaining in popularity.