It can also be used to alter the camera’s exposure control to produce imaginative images in difficult lighting. The software has allowed photographers using more than 50 models of Canon PowerShot cameras to reprogram the time lapse instructions to record construction projects or to use motion-sensing programs to capture animals in the deep woods. Lilja used it to reprogram his camera to snap one shot every 15 seconds on its journey into the stratosphere. It is called the Canon Hack Development Kit (or C.H.D.K. He chose that particular point-and-shoot camera because a group of programmers from around the world had created software that gave photo hobbyists like him the ability to change the way Canon intended the camera to operate.
Lilja, of Cedar Falls, packed his Canon A570is with a GPS transmitter in a cushioned box (and attached his phone number in case the GPS failed). “I got a picture when the balloon was at about 87,000 feet above northeast Iowa,” he said. When he is not fighting fires in Waterloo, Iowa, Pete Lilja likes to rig his camera to a weather balloon and send it up to record the world.
