Any recommendations on cameras for capturing laser shows?

[White-Light]

The biggest problem with any camera is keeping gain under control.

Most consumer cameras gain up automatically.

Also, video cameras rarely take good stills and stills cameras rarely take good video.

Those photos of Gooey's are very nice but a lot of it is down to the camera operator as Andy said.

- I notice on many of those without much grain, there's evidence of a 2nd curtain sync flash - ie long exposure followed by a flash at the very end. Very good technique for capturing still lasers and reducing the amount of visible grain in low light exposures.

eg. On the car bonnet and the side of the other car, you can see the flash reflection as you can on the hand held shot where the hand is clearly burnt out by the flash being too close to it.

Contrast that with the blue and red lasers together in a dark room, and the grain is all too apparent in that shot as the gains kicked in. It was obviously in Program mode and the camera upped the ISO rating to a very high level to assist the exposure.

That doesn't mean they aren't great shots, it isn't a decent camera and there isn't great technique from Gooey here, just that with moving scans you'd find it much harder to get sharpness, saturation and keep grain under control.

Equally in video mode, its almosy certain the camera would gain up automatically in dimly lit situations.

However, long exposures followed by 2nd curtain will still leave trails on moving images. The best way to capture great stills is probably to cheat and project a static pattern. Essentially thats what Gooey's done by using the pointers as a source and all credit to his camera skills.

I've seen some great stills on here from Selem and if anyone knows how to capture great moving laser scans them I'm all ears!

If you want truly great still shots I'd recommend a quality digital SLR such as a Canon EOS 300D, 350D or 400D plus an off camera flash unit if you want to capture people in the frame as well (using 2nd sync). Gooey's camera is a "prosumer" model so sits between consumer cameras and pro / digital SLR cameras in performance which is why his results are generally very good. Although ISO (gain) got out of hand on the red / blue laser photo.

If you want great video, I'd recommend either a semi pro camcorder which has manual gain control eg. Canon AH-X1 (cost a lot of $) or a top quality consumer video camera which has some user modes that lock the gain to zero (typically spotlight and firework modes do this although I advise you to consult the manual 1st).

On the video front, HD camcorders are worse in low light than SD although you can get good results with HD if you can lock the gain out - this is my laser video'd on my HD consumer camcorder in Fireworks Mode in a totally unlit room at night. Without the laser running I needed a torch to move around as the curtains blacked it out so well:

Gets better picture wise after 2 mins 55 secs (smoke levels settle out - slightly too much at the beginning).

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Iho6Cg8ptLY&fmt=18

This is unadjusted btw so no additional saturation or contrast.

With a hazer instead of fog you'd get even clearer video. Note however the total lack of grain in fireworks mode, only fog particles visible.

Finally, SD camcorders suffer from shake less than HD. Important if you're not able to use a tripod.

[sugeek]

Very true... having full access to all the manual settings is a must for laser photography!

Manual settings are the key to taking great laser photos! Especially when you start doing RGB or ION lasers. I used to use two different cameras switching depending on the light/quality I was looking for. My really old minolta would differ its shudder and exposure times depending on the charge of the batteries, which made for some very interesting 'artsy' shots. A Monopod helps alot, but also messing with shutter times (well virtual shutter in this case, and white balance)!

I never took too much video, I would imagine a pan/tilt camera mounted on top of your projector would do a nice set of pictures/video. I don't have any specifics on what brand/model to buy.

-Adam