If you check the comments on my Garage Trailer Lift, you’ll find that there is a great deal of interest in storing your trailer in the garage. I got a lot of questions concerning my design and the products I used. So, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I might get some photos from others that did something similar. Brian sent me these photos of his implementation. Nice trailer Brian!

There’s also a Garage Boat Lift and another recent Trailer Lift on my blog.

I shot this video because I wanted to capture a strange phenomenon that I had never seen before.
It was a cold evening with no wind and microscopic crystalline snow was falling.
Our neighborhood streetlights were shooting spires of light upward as if they were concert spotlights.
15 minutes after shooting the video.. the spires of light were gone. The snow appeared more moist and less crystalline.

I was disappointed with my 7d video in low light. There was a lot of color noise which was very distracting, so I tried several solutions to remove it.

The video compression of the embedded video makes it hard to really appreciate the difference of the before and after.
If you really want to see the difference, then download this 38MB wmv video clip…

Download spire.wmv (to download use right click, save link)

There are 2 popular tools for removing video noise.

1. magic bullet denoiser
2. neat video

I tried the demos for both.  Magic Bullet Denoiser and Neat Video Home version both did a poor job of noise removal in my opinion.
The Pro version of Neat Video did a nice job of noise removal, but costs $100.

I didn’t want to spend $100 for Neat Video Pro, so I devised a solution that gave me results just as good, plus a few added features.
The only downside is that is requires extra time and effort.

First I used Sony Vegas to generate individual tif images for the frames of my video.
Then I used lightroom3 noise reduction to remove the noise on all of the images.
Finally I used Sony Vegas to convert the images back into a video.

For $21, this electric helicopter is outstanding. The construction is perfect. The gyro makes it fly smooth and hover accurately. 3 channels means you can’t pitch the heli side to side, only forward and backward. Actually, this makes it easier to fly because it reduces the complexity of controls.

The size of components is amazingly small. I still can’t get over the size of the electric motors. You get about 6 minutes of flight time out of a 50 minute charge using the USB charging cable.

If you want to shoot timelapse photos with your Canon camera, then you’ve got to get an intervalometer.  It’s just a fancy name for a remote timer.  This timer is available on ebay and is sold from China.  There are many different remote timers available for Canon cameras including Canon’s TC-80N3.

After my usual thorough research and good advice from a friend… I determined that this Yongnuo was the best choice when you consider that is looks and operates exactly like the Canon model at 1/5 the price!  I paid $28 (free shipping) on ebay! Thanks Amy!