Art project: how to take pictures of myself while I sleep?

ProfHankD wrote:

Leo48 wrote:

Hi everyone, my partner and I want to take pictures of ourselves while we sleep! We had the idea to mount a camera over the bed (prob birdseye view, somehow!) and have the camera take pictures every, say, 15- 30 seconds over an 8-10 hour period. This is not an easy thing to figure out how to do! So I'm calling on your thoughts - how can I practically execute this?!

I especially want to know what camera I could use to do this, and whether this is even technically possible. Here are the requirements I think the camera would have to have:

- Shoot at high ISO's

- Have a very quiet shutter (we'll need to be able to get to sleep, and stay asleep.)

- Have a reasonable battery life. We really want it to shoot continuously. Or maybe there are cameras you can keep plugged into a power source?

- Have some sort of interval timer.

ANy thoughts?

I'm going to ignore the potentially voyeuristic aspect of what you're trying to do and just answer your question assuming this is a legitimate medical monitoring or art project....

Assuming that you sleep in the dark, no camera is going to get enough light for a fast shutter speed, but that shouldn't matter: people sleeping usually aren't moving much over short intervals and if you get an occasional blur, that's probably a feature rather than a problem. In fact, for frame-to-frame continuity, you'd want most of the interval between firing the shutter to be capture time -- so close to 15s shutter speed for one shot every 15s should be fine.

There are certainly times when my wife moves quite a bit at night, I wouldn't recommend using shutter speeds longer than 1s. Fortunately its easy to get round the lighting issues. Use an Infra red converted camera along with infra red LED lighting. I have a torch that you have to look directly at to see the faint glow to know its on. It provides considerable lighting for my converted camera.

Given that, almost any camera can work. I'd probably use a cheap Canon PowerShot under CHDK -- for example, an ELPH180. CHDK allows you to trivially not only do simple intervalometer shots, but can be scripted to do fancier things. The leaf shutters are also fairly quiet and the 20MP JPEG or raw from the ELPH180 is much higher quality than any webcam can deliver (although a webcam is silent, it's lower resolution and would need to be using NIR LEDs to get much of anything even if you shot video and did image stacking like they do for telescopes). An AC adapter to run the camera is also cheap -- camera + adapter was under $100 last time I bought them. The PowerShots are easily light enough to mount on the ceiling using the non-maring 3M Command sticky tapes.

There are also external intervalometers that will work with pretty much any camera that has a wired shutter release port.

The easiest solution may well be a security type camera - many of these will see via IR in the dark, they run of the mains & can record video from which you can extract stills. VGA resolution models are available at trivial prices too. I don't think that an option if you want high resolution images I've not seen any going above ~2MP.