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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Why simulate? Most modern cameras can be controlled through USB. Just actually take each one (except for ISO, which you can easily fake), encode the frames in a reasonable bitrate MP4, then have a lookup for the frame in the video. :D

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I don’t know if I follow. You mean to keep a fan moving, take pictures with all the different combinations (aperture and shutter speed). Then merge on an MP4 file that you can lookup somehow the setting combo with the frame?

Sounds… reasonable I guess! I guess it can be simpler than I imagined. The owner of the site just needs a fan :-)

This would require 18000 frames

If you consider how long lower speed shutters will take and the aperture combinations, it would take a long time to take all the pictures and would stop being feasible.

How so? Longest shutter on the page is 0.5 seconds. If every single picture was at 0.5 seconds, that's only 2.5 hours of exposure.

So what. That's a little over an hour [1], and you're done! Some smallish JPG is all that's presented here anyways, so using a reasonable MP capture to JPG should easily fit on its SD card.

Also, there's around 4600 that are pure white, and something near that that are pure black, for the scene above (although more dynamic range would be very cool).

[1] 18000 * 0.5s shutter / 3600 = 2.5 hours for worst case shutter, /2 for average = 1.25 hours of exposure.

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