This may or may not be of use to some of you who are heavily involved in photography, above or below ground.
Many of us are now carrying small high end point and shoot cameras that have sub reflex camera facilities, they take great photos (in the right hands). Many of the manufacturers actually program in restrictions in the software for series of models as well of course in altering hardware specs.
How many times have you said or heard it said its a pity they didn't keep that facility or why don't they allow this etc when a new model comes out. And you know full well that all they've done is tweak the software. Well the camera hacking brigade have really come up trumps with a type of temporary firmware program called CHDK. Exciting though it is sadly to the best of my knowledge it only applies to various cameras in the Canon range. In its simplest form it extends the range of your cameras facilities.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK Briefly, it allows as is the case with my camera A640, for me to take RAW images, I can auto bracket for HDR, many other features some way above me. In addition and heres the bonus if you can write UBasic you can run scripts written in that language or use scripts already written and found on the wiki. You load all of this onto the SD card where it remains, it is not transferred to the cameras memory. There is an autoscript to activate it every time you turn the camera on or just boot it up each time, the choice is yours.
2 useful scripts are the lightning and the intervalometer script. The first allows the camera to be "parked" ready to take a picture, when the light level is altered (lightning) it does just that automatically. The intervalometer will take pictures at determined intervals automatically. Another script I've just remembered is the motion activation, again if something moves in the frame it will take a picture.
A feature built into the CHDK itself is the facility to use the USB socket to attach a home made remote shutter. Easily made from a battery, button switch and USB plug, details on the wiki.
Canon are aware of this hacking and naturally any warranty and the like would be null and void by using such firmware/software.
I'm using the AllBest build but there are others. Enjoy.
:thumbsup: