Where these tools came from.
This is where photographer Ichiro Murata writes at length about photography, engineering, building his own tools, the work he has done with camera makers and magazines, and what he has thought about while standing in the field at night.
It is not a product manual, and it is not the Development Log — that one records what is being built and decided right now. These pieces are about what came before: the experience that Sidekick was eventually built out of.
Story 1
— It started with a climber's headlamp on Mt. Tsubakuro
I had never heard the term "lighten composite" when I stacked two frames of a climber's headlamp on Mt. Tsubakuro and found a way to keep only the bright parts. From there: continuous star exposures, "Infinite Track" in Digital Photo, April 2010, and software to automate the work.
Story 2
— I was making strange things long before I became a photographer
From a PC-8001mkII and cassette tapes to university research, measurement jigs in my engineering job, and external power supplies for digital cameras. A look back at a habit I have had for a long time: if the tool I need isn't sold anywhere, I build it.
Story 3
— Being able to build something is not the same as needing to
My elaborate first intervalometer broke, and the last one I built was simple enough to fit inside a battery box. Being able to build something is not the same as needing to — and why I decided not to automate certain things even though I could.
Story 4
— Making the O-GPS1 and Astrotracer into something I could actually use in the mountains
I borrowed a pre-release O-GPS1, took it into the mountains, and failed the precise calibration over and over. "It can track for up to five minutes" and "five minutes is the right exposure" are not the same statement. A story about useful performance rather than maximum performance.
Story 5
— Why I decided to build Sidekick Planner
Sidekick Planner did not come out of failed shoots. It came out of a very simple question: "If someone tells me to stand here, I can take the photograph. But I can't work out where 'here' is." I wanted a way to find that 'here' more easily.