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Hi everyone!

I've just switched blog software, and I'm now using Wordpress instead of Blogger. This change will give me a lot more control and hopefully you a better blog reading experience. Most everything will stay the same, however, I have been unable to keep the same feed url. That means if you follow my blog via the RSS feed, you will need to update the feed address in your reader.

The easiest way to do that is visit my blog at http://neil.creek.name/blog and click on the orange rss/subscribe button. If you want to update the url manually, the new one is: http://neil.creek.name/blog/?feed=rss2

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, but I can assure you that things will get better and better for the blog, and I'm hoping you'll like some of the new ideas I'm planning to work on.

Thank you for your patience!

Neil

P365 Jul12: Chibi in bed

Every night, almost without exception, out "little" furry family member joins us in bed for a cuddle. He's done this ever since he was a kitten, and when he does, his purr is loud and continual. He loves to bury his face in Nomi's hair and he kneads the pillow and sometimes Nomi's head with his claws. He's obviously extremely content.

As you can see, I get somewhat the rough part of the bargain, or the "wrong end" of the stick. Especially when he's a bit gassy... But over all, Chibi's nightly half hourly presence is very comforting :)

For this shot I put the camera in the cupboard on a shelf, propped up on a jewelery box. The flash was on the drawers to camera right and remotely triggered, to bounce off the ceiling. I set the camera up with the wireless shutter release before going to bed, so when the furry monster hopped up between us, I just rolled over and grabbed the remote from the bedside table and fired off a few shots.

P365 Jul11: Walk in the park

I took advantage of the rare sunshine today and took a stroll in the cold fresh air to the local park.

P365 Jul10: Laser trace

I was inspired by this (far superior to mine) photo by a US physics student, so tried to do my own version!




I used a bulldog clip to attach my new laser pointer and a weight to a cable that I suspended from a light in our lounge, so that it was just barely above the ground. With the camera on a tripod and the room's lights off, I gave the pendulum a gentle but firm swing and opened the camera's shutter. The exposure time varied, but averaged at about four minutes or so.

As the laser swung, the bright point traced lines on the floor that the camera captured. The uneven and erratic path resulted from a number of imperfections in the arrangement: the pointer wasn't centred relative to the cable, the weight was off-balance and the hanging light to which I hung the pendulum also swung, adding a degree of randomness to the whole equation.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to suspend the pendulum from a very high point, such as a five story stairwell, and I'd be able to add a much heavier, balanced weight. This would result in a much slower swinging motion (due to the pendulum length) and a much longer duration of the swing (tue to the momentum of a heavier weight). If that was possible, then a far more detailed, regular and interesting pattern would propably emerge, like the one in the linked example. It would also be cool if I was able to show the Earth's rotation as seen in the example. Anyone know of any publicly accessible 5 storey stairwells that I can darken completely and photograph for an hour or two? :)

P365 Jul09: Laser Livi

Got myself a laser pointer today. I figured I could have some fun with it and use it as an element in some P365 photos. That, and it's great for playing with the cat hehe.

Here is Livi illuminated only with the laser pointer. 10 second exposures.

P365 Jun08: Livi on Wii

Our adorable niece, Olivia, has stayed with us for the last couple of nights, and we've had a lot of fun, including playing lots of Nintedo Wii!

P365 Jul07: Flash battery

One of the problems I've been having with the flash gear, is that it can have a hard time keeping up with me sometimes. It takes time to recharge the capacitor (the thing that holds the power before firing the flash), and too often the flash isn't ready and doesn't fire. As a result I've missed getting some pretty nice photos.

External power supplies are the answer to this problem, but they are very very expensive, even for relatively small flash units like mine. Fortunately, I found a way to "hack" a common, inexpensive battery, so that I can power my flash with it! It uses 'dummy' batteries made with wooden dowel and cheap electrical cabling. The details can be found on this thread on the Strobist Flickr group discussion board, and the hack will work with pretty much any small battery powered flash.

This is what my 580 EX looks like with the external battery attached.

P365 Jul06: Macros & portraits

I have a bumper blog entry for you today!

Our friends Darren and Colin visited last night for dinner. Darren is also a photographer, and we had a lot of fun taking photos together, starting with some macro shots, then taking photos of everyone. Nomi had a go at processing some of the pics too, and liked some of them as black and whites. I agree and think they work pretty well like that!

I think I've managed to get contrasty photos using the coloured gels for dramatic effect out of my system. My big challenge now is to find a way to effectively use the light I have, along with the gels, to take great portrait photos that don't look like a kid playing with a new toy :)

Btw, one of the images from tonight is the source for my new profile pic in the right column. Nomi didn't like the old one cos I wasn't smiling and that didn't look like me. I guess I do smile a lot hehe :)

P365 Jul05: Dark Bill

Just having some fun experimenting with dramatic lighting angles!

P365 Jul04: Backlit Anna

Once again, Anna was a great sport and modelled for me as I tried to re-create a cool lighting effect I saw in a music video. The video had a cool backlit effect that came from having two lights behind and to each side of the model. I only have two flashes myself, so I was going to have to try and find a way to illuminate the front of the face.

The first shot is essentially only the back lights illuminating the sides of Anna's face. They're a bit over exposed, losing most of the detail. The power levels on the two aren't perfeclty matched and the angles are a bit off too, but for the sake of the exercise, I figured this would do. There's no front illumination here, and Anna's face is way too dark.


Next I tried using the ambient light (the houselights) as fill for the face, but to get this much illumination I had to go to 800 ISO, maximum apeture and 1/20th sec, and still the face is too dark. The result is an improvement, but just not practical.


For the last shot here, I got Anna to hold my 80cm silver reflecter in front of her and just below the view of the camera. The light fill on the face is much better, but still not bright enough to allow me to dial back the rear flashes, which are still a bit too over exposed. Also the angle of the fill light, coming from below, just isn't flattering. To pull this off, I really need a third flash to illuminate the front of the face. A fourth would be needed if I wanted to do any effects with the background. One day I'll revisit the idea!

Thanks for your patience and help Anna!

P365 Jul03: Microwaved chip bag

This is what happens when you put a chip bag in the microwave.

NOTE: Do not do this yourself. I can only take responsibility for my own stupidity :)

P365 Jul02: Jewelery

Some more photos of Naomi's beautiful beadwork.

More entries soon!

Sorry my blog has been so irregular lately. Work keeps me busy! I was intending to do the last few days' entries tonight, but a friend needed help with their web site. Tomorrow morning for sure! :)

P365 Jul01: Anna

The beautiful Anna again poses for me while I get more practice with the light and have fun with my new flash gels against the backdrop. For some reason these pics seemed to come out of Lightroom a bit darker than they seemed in the application...

P365 Jun30: Brett & Amanda

Still practicing with the lights. This time with friends Brett and Amanda from the Marine Aquarium Society of Victoria.

P365 Jun29: Grug & Danny

More practice with the new light gear, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I also used the new gels, shooting through a dried flower display to cast a nice shadow on a plain wall. It's remarkable what a neat effect this simple technique can have.

Top is Grug (AKA Andy), below is Danny.

P365 Jun28: Burn baby burn!

Disco inferno! Well, maybe not...

Another "what the hell do I shoot tonight?" shot. Actually a composite of a couple of shots, cos it was really hard to get everything just right in one shot.

P365 Jun27: Filter pouches

I managed to get my grubby hands on a sampler book of theatrical light filters. Coincidentally, the filter samples are excactly the same size as the front of my flashes! Of course since they're *exactly* the same size, holding them in front of the flash is an issue. Also, the book came with so MANY awesome colours that I didn't want to have to spend hours glueing tabs onto the many filters. So I had to come up with a solution.

Nomi nicked a couple of sheets of acetate (clear photocopy plastic/paper) from work, and after taking some measurements I made a couple of pouches. I used electrical tape to join the two together at one end, and mask the acetate to the size of the filter samples. The other end I masked with tape but left the end open. I used some more of the velcro spots to attach the pouches to the camera and to close the flap. So now to use a filter, with the pouch on the flash, I open up the pouch, put in the filter, then pull the pouch firmly closed. This holds the filter neatly in place! I also stuck a couple of velcro dots on the end of my snoot, so I can even use the filters on a snooted flash!

I'm looking forward to giving these some field trials :)

P365 Jun26: Giant Chibi

Our kitty Chibi, sitting on his usual "I'm hungry so I'm going to get your attention" position on my desk. He's a big boy, but the fisheye doesn't help shrink him either :)

P365 Jun25: Bubbles in water

Bubbles in water, shot with various coloured filters over the flash then cleaned up in photoshop.

This is the setup for the photo.

P365 Jun24: Flash mods

Velcro is love! I spent some of this afternoon doing some minor upgrades to my Canon 580EX flash. Canon flashes (till the newest 580EX II) do not have a sync cable port. As such I've been forced to attach my wireless flash with the hotshoe adapter which means I also have to use the very flimsy remote's cold foot attachment to mount the flash. That was a disaster waiting to happen.

So using some instructions I found online, I cracked open the flash and soldered in and mounted a jack that I can use. It was fiddly and a little stressful, but it worked first time! Thanks for getting the jack for me Grug!

I also put sticky velcro dots all over the flash in strategic locations. Some on the side to stick the wireless receivers, and some around the head of the flash to stick on the colour correction gels (seen in the top photo in their stored position). The orange is for tungsten light, the green for flourescent.

I also discovered the cat doesn't fit in the light tent :)

Super high res pano.

For a long time I've been looking for a way to show my super high resolution panoramic photography online. These massive images are huge files and would bring just about any web browser to its knees, and would take a long time to download.

I once tried to use the Google Maps interface for one image, but I found that to be too slow, unreliable and difficult to generate.

Recently, however, I've found a nifty little flash app called "Zoomify", which is available free as its basic version. This does everything I need, so with a bit of tweaking I managed to get the output looking how I liked, and inserted it into the typical panorama template for my site. You can click the image below to see the fifty-five megapixel panorama of the view from the top of the Queenstown, New Zealand chairlift.

Don't worry, it's dial-up friendly. Read the line at the bottom of the page to see how to navigate the image.


If anyone is interested in learning how to do this with their own images, you can get the software at the Zoomify web page. Feel free to look at the source code of the linked page to see how I integrated it into my template.

P365 Jun23: Taylor girls.

It's too late, and I'm too tired to comment, but here are my nieces on Naomi's side of the family. More fun with the lights.