Hey! I remember doing that. But it wasn't regarded as tedious compared with a lot of the operations drudgery. It was a point of pride to be able to do it from memory, error-free[1], as quickly as possible. Particularly satisfying was running a forefinger along the row of (16) switches to flip them to the zero position in preparation for entering the next number. We had simple pleasures in those days.
[1] of course it had to be 100% error free
I suggest you consider in-car accident recorders. They record continuously, and when an event occurs, recording stops and the pictures captured previously are not overwritten.
Whenever we look to ancient languages to rob them of words we wish to add to the vocabulary of the English language to suit modern needs, we're not obliged to import the source language's rules of grammar (customs if you will) so it's quite legitimate to apply the rules of the hosting language's grammar to those 'immigrant' words.
The word 'television' must represent a particular conundrum for the cognoscenti in this regard since it's a compound of the Greek 'tele' and the latin 'visio' suffixed with the letter n.
According to wikipedia, we the English weren't directly responsible for the creation of this 'frankenword'. It turns out that we 'borrowed' it from the French who, presumably, were the culprits for such a frankenstein like mashing together of the Greek for far (tele) and the Latin verb to see (visio - explicitly, "I see") to produce the 'French word' "télévision".
Ignoramuses the Yanks (in general) might be but creating the plural from antenna by the well established rules of English grammar whereby, in general, the letter s is appended to the end of the word is a perfectly legitimate way to pluralise it.
With modern P&S digital cameras using electronic shutters, it's quite possible to program the flash exposure controller to take a 'snap' triggered by the lightning flash itself. Whether this is fast enough to properly capture the event in full is another question to which I don't, as yet, have the answer.
More do-able is to use a linked matching pair of Canon cameras both pointing to the same view of the sky running suitably written CHDK scripts to continuously monitor via interleaved overlapping long duration exposures (a few seconds to a minute or two depending on how dark the sky is).
Having two cameras taking turns to watch the sky eliminates the small risk that a single camera might miss a lightning event whilst it's busy setting up the next exposure (resetting the image sensor either by direct deletion or simply the effect of storing the shot to its long term storage medium - typically an SD card).
I haven't looked at the full feature list of the current CHDK offerings but I'd be very much surprised if such a 'Lightning Capture' mode isn't featured in some form or other.
Anyone who owns a Canon P&S camera who fancies capturing some impressive examples of Mother Nature's more pyrotechnical moods would be well advised to visit the CHDK wiki page at
"Disk" was never vital. An OS loaded from disk might count, but there's always been other ways. And these days, having the OS in some form of solid state memory is getting very popular.
It existed before disks had been invented.. I recall people having to enter code using 16 toggle switches and a push button to enter the boot code needed to run the paper tape reader before the "OS" could be loaded.
... altogether, now, for the PDP-11 ...
16701 26 12702 352 ...... and that's about all I can remember from 40 years ago!
Yes I know I was using what's called pre-triggering years ago in fact on Oscillascopes over 30 years ago. Here's it in use using a webcam.
I'm not sure it is possible, can you name a camera you can do that with and even if you could it wouldn't work.
I do and you can't. The speed of light is just too fast for any P&S camera. What you use is pre-trigger, which I think is being built into the higher range P&S type cameras.
better to use a 'movie' camera and software. It can be done with a stills camera (trigger it by light) but it doesn;t work for lightning. I've taken a picture of a baloon bursting.
bit ham-fisted though.
don;t think so a CHDK has almost died out of modern cameras, I don't think you can use it on the latest processors.
My BBC computer from 1982 used a ROM to hold the OS made it faster to boot than laoding from disc. ROMs also held a word processor, spreadsheet and speach synthesizer. Earlier computers could use punched card/tape and cassette tape for storage.
Can't you trigger on the leader strike to capture the main strike?
Then you'll miss the leader strike if there is one.
With a digital camera, it makes a lot more sense to take photos continuously and keep what happens to coincide with a strike.
The BBC was a class act. Utterly amazing how they fitted a very capable word processor (View) and spreadsheet (ViewSheet) in 16K ROMs.
Trouble with that method is it's difficult to know when a strike will take place. It's not like a DFS sale ;-) Most P&S cameras don;t have the B setting so you're limited to whatever lon gest exposure the camera will do which is usually 30 seconds or less and it 's difficult estimaking a lightning strike to within 30 seconds, even then you can only really do this at night. Daylight lighting is even more diffi cult to catch on a still camera.
e place. It's not like a DFS sale ;-)
ongest exposure the camera will do which is usually 30 seconds or less and it's difficult estimaking a lightning strike to within 30 seconds, even the n you can only really do this at night. Daylight lighting is even more dif ficult to catch on a still camera.
I have photographed lightening back in film days. Set the shutter to T and keep the aperture small. Then close the shutter once a strike has been obse rved. Not perfect but a bit of fun.
But as whisky-dave said, most P&S cameras don't have the 'B' setting, nor the 'T'. For my Canon, the hacked software doesn't provide it either, it would give me a maximum exposure of 64 seconds, so it's not worth it. If it gave a 'B' setting, then I would load it up.
I once took a shot of the ISS crossing overhead for a period of 5 minutes, but I had to use my film SLR to do so.
So that explains this then;?.....
The whole point of that approach is that you don't need to know when a strike will take place, you detect that it has taken place and keep the shots that were taken in the time just before the strike did take place.
Doesn't need to be.
You obviously use a camera that will do what you want to do.
If you are taking shots continuously, that is what you want.
Don't need to estimate anything when you take shots continuously and keep the ones that were taken when you detect that a strike happened.
Completely routine with what I propose.
This RPC also has its OS in ROM. But does have it modified by things kept on the HD, so not as fast to boot as the earlier Acorn machines.
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