Flash Components

• AD1200 Pro Battery Powered flash system

• Ring flash Head for AD1200 Pro

• High-Capacity battery for AD1200 Pro

• 

Lens

• Linos Inspect XL 60mm (link)

Color Calibration Resources

• XRite ColorChecker calibration data sheet -

SVCam Resources

Flash Setup

1. Set up the flash with the desired settings, as settings influence the flash duration. My assumptions are:

   1. Manual mode

   2. 1/1, 1/2+0,3-0,6 or 1/2 flash power level

   3. Not sure about "stable color temperature" and it's impact to the frequency at which the flash can fire.. Should be tried out. We'd like a constant color temperature, but not sure what the downside is here, since it's not turned on always.

   4. "stand by" should be turn off, or set to something like 120 min.

   5. "Delay flash" should be turn off

   6. Modeling lamps should be turned off

   7. Observe the flash duration time t=0.1. This is presumably done with the "TIMES" function of the flash.

Camera Setup/Config

1. Turn off all auto settings.

   1. This includes exposure times, gains, white balancing, etc.

2. Set exposure time to half of t0.1 from the flash. Pay attention to difference in units.

3. While you have a non-changing level of ambient light:

   1. Capture a series of images with a varied camera-set delay between flash trigger and image exposure. The entire scene has to stay constant.

   2. If the images are overexposed in this experiment, modify the aperture on the lens accordingly.

   3. Note the delay that resulted in the brightest image and put that delay into the camera.

4. Color and focus calibration.

   1. Place a color checker below the camera, preferably the big one. If the camera cannot move in the z-axis, place the color checker 15 cm above the pot soil level.

   2. Refocus the camera to ensure that focus is accurate. This is done with the color checker by zooming in on the millimeter markers. Open up the aperture all the way and repeatedly make tiny adjustments -> image capture -> zoom in and evaluate until focus is just right.

   3. Reset the aperture to an appropriate level based on the brightness of the image at the designated flash power.

   4. Capture a good quality image of the colorchecker to be used for color calibration (specifically to determine the color calibration matrix used for DNG-formatting of the images)

To determine the effect of the stable color temperature, it makes sense to run a stress test with and without it at our desired flash power. That would also help answer whether the flash will bottleneck the bbot at the given power level (edited) 

To take an image from the mini-computer

Open up a browser and copy and paste this into address bar:

localhost:5000/image

• place colorchecker card 15 cm

• then move

• set the aperture to the lowest number

• adjust exposure

• start finding the right focus so that the milliliter scale on the colorchecker are incredibly clear, adjust by millimeter

• after the right focus has been identified, set it using the set screw

• now adjust aperture and exposure as needed

Location	Date	Scene	Lens height above ground	Lens height above plants	Focus	Aperture	Exposure	Flash Power	Image	Closeup	Scene image
				1.66 m	21.5	4	1	1/32
NC	2024/11/08	partly cloudy, shading from the building	1.7 m		21	8	1500

Camera Settings

• Aperture and focus done manually on site

• Exposure setting configured in the .txt file.