[Hdri] HDRI capture program for Canon EOS cameras under Mac OS X

[Gregory J. Ward]

Hi All,

Under contract with LBNL, I have written an HDR capture program that  
works with the Canon EOS 5D camera under Mac OS X, and should work  
with other Canon EOS cameras as well.  When open from the Finder, the  
application triggers a sequence of image captures, saving them to the  
laptop across a USB or Firewire connection.  Setting the camera in  
manual mode, the sequence begins at the fastest available shutter  
speed and works its way down until it finds the first exposure with  
over-exposed pixels in its thumbnail.  It saves this image along with  
the previous one, and continues downward in the exposure range  
(longer shutter times) for the number of stops and images you specify  
in a configuration file.

Unfortunately, CanonHDRcap does not work from the command line, as  
the Canon software requires building with CodeWarrior and an outdated  
Carbon application package model, which doesn't support command-line  
operation.  However, using the OS X "open" command, you can run it  
from a batch file and determine when it finishes based on another  
output file it creates, specifying the names of the image files it  
has created.  (My next task is to build a script that runs hdrgen  
automatically afterwards, which should be easy enough.)

I've put the app. on my website for any masochistic beta testers who  
want to have a go with their Canon EOS camera.  It produces beautiful  
results, so long as you don't mind lugging a laptop and a tripod with  
you; it eliminates all camera movement and does a much better job  
capturing the full range than auto-bracket mode.  The link is below:

	http://www.anyhere.com/gward/pickup/CanonHDRcap.tar.gz

Most of the camera settings are left as set on the camera, including  
aperture, white balance, JPEG/RAW mode, etc.  The one thing I'm sure  
doesn't work is storing both JPEG and RAW images at the same time,  
but let me know if you run into any other problems.

-Greg