Raspberry Pi Camera Setup Tutorial for Beginners

In this Raspberry Pi Camera tutorial we are going to see how to setup and use the Camera module to take photos and videos!

When I first received my Raspberry Pi, about a month ago, the first thing I wanted to have was this camera module. I have a passion for photography and from the moment I saw this module I came up with many project ideas. It is an impressive little device, it has a resolution of 5Mp for still images and it can record FULL HD video at 30 FPS.

All you have to do is to connect this ribbon cable to camera connector on the Raspberry Pi board which is next to the HDMI output. The shiny side of the cable must face the HDMI port. You then have to lock it down. That's it! Let's now go to the computer to see how to use the module.

After booting up we open a console window and we type the following two commands in order to update the system to the latest version of the available software.

First we run the command: sudo apt-get update
Next we run the command: sudo apt-get upgrade

This may take some time if your system wasn't updated recently. After the upgrade of the system is completed we can run the following command: sudo raspi-config
From the menu that appears we have to enable the Camera module. After doing that, we press the finish button and we are asked to reboot the system. That's it. When the system reboots, we are ready to use the camera module. Let's take some still shots now!
I have connected the 5inch touch display I showed you few days ago, to the Raspberry Pi board in order to see what happens when taking a still image or a video. You can use your monitor instead with a HDMI cable if you don't have a small display like this.
In order to take a still show we have to use the following command:

raspistill –o imagename.jpg --stats

When we execute the command, at the display we can see a preview window for 5 seconds and then a still image is captured.
We can use any filename we like after the –o flag at the command. You can see that the image has been created in my Desktop because I was running the command from the Desktop folder.
In order to capture a video we have to use the following command.
raspivid –o testvideo.avi –t 10000

That command creates a video with a filename testvideo.avi and a length of 10 seconds. In the display after running the command we can see a preview of the video and we can then find the created video in the Desktop folder. But now let's go outside and take some real world images and footage.

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