Laguna Beach Bikini

There is a live StudioCam feature on Laguna Beach Bikini. Here are a few technical notes on how we added this feature to the website and how you can easily do the same thing.

The StudioCam is just another name for a webcam. I suppose if it was set up on the beach it word be a BeachCam; or in a club, a ClubCam. You get the idea. The very first webcam application I set up was way back in 1998. We used to broadcast a picture of local surf conditions at our beach in Laguna. The image on the left is an example of what our StudioCam image looks like from our photo studio in Prague.

To set up a webcam you need a video camera and webcam software. Of course, you will also need a webserver to serve the images to your visitor’s web browser. The webcam software periodically takes a snapshot from the camera, and then uploads the the image file via ftp to your webserver.

Here is how we set up a webcam on an Apple Macintosh in three simple steps:

Step 1: Get a Video Camera
For a camera, any video camera that you can connect to your computer will do. This can be a high end Digital Video camera that connects to through the Firewire input, or it can be an inexpensive USB webcam. USB cameras run about $50 or $25 or sometimes cheaper. If you don’t already have a digital video camera, start with a cheap USB camera. Try Walmart to get the best price. Mac users can get a fancy iSight camera with a built-in microphone but that is an expensive option.

We started with the Logitech E1000 shown on the right. We got it at Tesco for about 500 Czech crowns. The E1000 can give you an image as large as 640×480 pixels. We set the image size to 512×384 because it fits the page format. It has a fixed focal length wide-angle lens. It works better if you light the subject with plenty of light.

Step 2: Download and Install Macam
Macintosh users will have to install a bit of software first called macam from Sourceforge.net, which is a driver for USB webcams on Mac OS X. It allows hundreds of USB webcams to be used by many Mac OS X video-aware applications. Macam is necessary because drivers for all the possible cameras you can buy are not part of Mac OS X. Here is a link for Macam.

There was one problem when we installed the latest version of macam 0.9.2 It did not recognize our webcam. It kept saying no camera connected. So we had to download the latest cvs build available here. After that it recognized our camera. I have been troubleshooting these kinds of installation problems for year. If you can’t get something to work, keeping reading and trying stuff and you will eventually get it working.

Step 3: Download and Install EvoCam
The webserver software that we use is EvoCam for the Macintosh. If you have a Windows PC, there is similar software, but I don’t know the name of it because I am a Mac guy. EvoCam has many features including motion detection and time lapse photography. You can also stream video if you have a fast internet connection.

You can add text overlays, date and time stamp, and do all kinds of stuff. There are too many features to list them all here. Just get it and play with it. You can download EvoCam and use it for 15 days for free. After that it costs just $30 for a single user license. It is well worth the price. Here is a link to EvoCam from Evological.

Read the faqs and other information at the links and you will have a webcam up and running in no time flat.