“Wah-hoooo!”
Last night I ventured out at dusk (kind of trapped a bit by health conditions in the family) to the great out-back-doors (my backyard) and had a great time playing with the new scope.
I think I’ve got the tech settings down pretty well for now and mostly optimized, but it’s the physical setup that needs some work to make it much more field practical.
Nonetheless, I had a great time on my hands and knees sticking the probe into places where the sun don’t shine, as they say. (ahem)
The unit has an auto-focus function which I think, for super macro work, is way too slow and just gets in the way. But I just set it to manual override at the closest focus and that helped make it much more useful.
I also learned from an earlier in the day trial that for small, actively moving targets, like small insects and such, it was best to try and shoot steady, short (say 10sec or less) video clips that you can scrub out some decent frames from, rather than just shoot stills and miss something while looking for the shutter button on the tablet.
But I was delighted that for the most part, the camera’s tiny size, and the stiff cable seemed to create far fewer flushed-flights than holding even a small regular camera did. I think I need to work out a way to attack the camera assembly to a rigid stick of some sort to prevent the camera wobble that comes from being on the end of a stiff cable.
But the real fun, for me, anyhow, was when I started to just slowly push the camera head along at ground level through grass, mulch, along a wall bottom. You quickly develop a really neat sense of being a shrunken explorer in a miniature world, and it’s… well, a real kick!
The camera head has 4 tiny led lamps that you can control from a slider near the plug into the tablet. I kept that pretty low most of the time, to avoid startling the natives.
There were some camera-end attachments included in the kit that reflect more it’s intended function of a pipe/engine inspection tool: a hook, a 45 degree mirror, and a magnetic collar. I actually did use that last one as it extends further from the camera and thus adds more protection to the camera head itself.
But mostly, I just had about a half hour ride through the micro-bush. Wow, there is so much to see down there!
Some of it was quite busy, and a lot of it just enticingly out of visual detail range, but obviously active. Even the little 2 mm range ants are like little restless speed demons (most of the time, just a blur of motion).
I hope to get back down there again soon, and to come back here to share some frame grabs from my video scrubs, but yeah – definitely a hoot to play with!
Has anyone else had any experience playing with these devices? What did you think?
