I’m definitely no expert on Adobe Lightroom, however, a couple of hours messing around and the following pics were ‘Enhanced’.

This is my very first attempt at a long exposure shot. Trying to draw out all the light I could. To the naked eye, it was pitch black down at the beach, except for the lights of the restaurant. It was difficult to check settings/change settings on the fly as I was doing it due to low light.

To my eye, the green grass did look as good as the Adobe Lightroom edit. I guess I still have a lot of work to do on the camera settings. It was very bright and I was a little bit hungover?

I tried to do something a bit different here. The edit was supposed to highlight the face of the statue and make it stand out more. How do you think I went? any tips? Maybe I could have blurred out the background.

This is what happens when you are really hungover, laying on a very comfortable cushion chair and have absolutely zero motivation to do anything. Yep, take photos of trees and the sky for practice! In the Lightroom version, I tried to bring the green and blue out, however, I think the white in the balloon has become a bit green.

Last one promise! The idea here was to try and dray some of the brown back out of the rock face and the greens into the shrubs. It worked ok I think. Still some work to do.

Well, after all of that it is clear I still have a lot of work to do on the whole ‘Camera Settings’ and technique side of photography. Would it be correct in saying that a good photographer should not need to edit his/her photos at all to make them better?

Some of the Key components

• Lynx motion Tri-Tracks chassis
• 2 x 12V geared DC motors
• LM298 motor controller drivers
• 4s LiPo battery pack
• LED light bar
• Servos
• Taranis hobby RC transmitter
• FRsky receiver
• Teensy 3.2

The ‘Inspecto Roboto’ – A confined space inspection robot.

My house has a bit of a moisture problem and I wanted to inspect the floor crawl space to see if there was an obvious fault. It is a horrible cramped environment that whilst I can just wiggle inside the rat carcass at the door confirmed my doubts about venturing any further. So I decided to tackle the problem with robotics!

This was a weekend build and whilst I just used parts lying around I had a lot of nice spares and old projects to work with. Essentially this was a hybrid system using parts from an old racing drone & a lynx motion robotics kit.

Locomotion was a lynx motion Tri-Tracks chassis. It has a nice set of rubberized Tracks as well as an acrylic frame, two 12V geared DC motors and other associated hardware. A basic LM298 motor controller drives each set of tracks from a 4s LiPo battery pack tucked inside. The camera system was from an old racing drone with an FPV display to make driving it around easier. The servo allows for tilting the camera up, panning is just turning the robot on the spot. Finally, a large LED light bar from a vehicle was installed up against the front with some additional acrylic pieces to act as bushes and help retain it in place. The light is controlled via a relay as it is convenient to switch it off when unrequired as it draws about 12W.

The controller was a Taranis hobby RC transmitter paired with a FRsky receiver and a teensy 3.2. The teensy decodes the signals & operates the motors, lights & servo. I have written about using these transmitters with microcontrollers before (Here) and they are a great option for long-range and reliable communication which xBees & other serial radios often struggle with.

The whole system was a bit of a hack but as someone who often spends forever ‘gilding the lily’ on a project until they grow bored of it and don’t finish it, this was a fun and pleasant change.