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.

P365 Jun22: Mum & Dad

Had dinner with the folks tonight, and they were kind enough to pose for me so that I can get some more practice with the new light gear. These were the best shots, and I think they show some of the potential, but I feel that I'm very much fumbling in the dark (excuse the pun) for now, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of things soon!

P365 Jun21:More of the Boys

It's late so I'll make this quick. I had a stack of new lighting gear delivered today, and I had some fun photographing the guys with better light. It'll take me a while to really get to know how to use this gear effectively, but I'm pretty happy with my first go.

P365 Jun20: House textures

Something a bit different today... We're going to get some modular bookshelves made, to try and organise all the crap that's lying around on benches, desks and on the floor here. We're getting it custom built by the same guy who made our desk - which we are VERY happy with. It'll probably end up costing us only a little more than something bought from a furniture shop and we'll be able to get exactly what we want. ANYWAY... we wanted to see how our design idea would fit against the wall we were thinking of putting it against, so I whipped something up in 3D Stutio to see.

Well I love playing around with 3D graphics, and even though I'd already proved that the bookshelf would fit, I kept adding just a bit more to the model, and just a bit more. Well pretty soon I had the whole (empty) living room built in a fairly simple way! Just to add a bit more realism, I took the above photos to use as texture maps, which you can see in the renders below:

P365 Jun19: Light painted Sylvester

Nomi brought home a little LED flashlight that she picked up cheaply at a service station. We need a torch, but of course I saw a photographic opportunity. I grabbed our 50cm Sylvester figure and turned off the light. With a 30 second exposure, I briefly flashed the blue-tinted light on the cute little guy, then with some red cellophane over the torch, I traced his outline. Nothing stunning, but kinda cute and oddly cool.

P365 Jun18: Cameron girls

Our beautiful nieces paid us a visit today.

P365 Jun17: Iris & match

Something old and something new. I've done flowers to death, but I've never done an iris! So here you go :)

I also thought I'd try something a little more challenging, and boy was it a challenge. Shot with my macro set up, the match was a little disconcertingly close to the lens! With one match held in place with Nomi's "helping hands" mounted jewelery tweezers, another was lit and brought up beneath it to light it. I tried so very hard to catch the flame in the initial flash, but I wasn't able to freeze the movement enough to make it look clear. I got better results with slower shutter speeds of a few seconds after iginition. I might try again sometime.

P365 Jun16: Sakura figurine

The super cute Sakura from the anime series Card Captor Sakura, one of my favourites. This was shot in the light tent with flash on the right and a desk lamp on the left, thus the more yellow tone of the light from that side.

P365 Jun15: 20 sided dice

A late-at-night-what-to-shoot photo! This is a blast from my past from my Dungeons and Dragons days. This is a 20 sided dice which was used to see if the players were able to hit the big bad monsters with their swords and stuff :) Good times, good times!!

P365 Jun14: The boys

Sorry I've neglected posting the last few days! The reason in a sec... It's the boys and me! A hastily organised photo, at Grug's request, since I wasn't in the last group photo we did :) The wireless remote makes this a lot easier :)

The reason why I've been so slack lately is cos I've been playing a new game :) It's a really pretty MMO (massively multiplayer online) game called Rappelz. It's totally free and quite a lot of fun. I think it's Korean made, so it's full of amusing engrish, but for a free game it's totally awesome! It's a huge download, but if you like fantasy type games (think Diablo), I recommend giving it a shot :)

P365 Jun13: Bubbles!

I'm always looking for interesting things I can photograph in my lounge room. I like things that possess beauty on a small scale, so I can comfortably light and shoot them late in the day for a Project 365 photo. Today I had the idea of photographing bubbles. Here's how I set it up:

I got some air line and an air pump we used to use in our fish tank. You could achieve the same thing with a straw and a deep breath. I filled a small bowl about 1/3 - 1/2 full with dishwashing detergent, and clipped the air hose so that it was at the bottom of the bowl. When I turned on the pump, air bubbled up through the detergent, and after a few minutes I had a bowl almost overflowing with bubbles. I simply put the bowl in my light tent, with my remote flash (you could use any powerful light) outside. I also used my macro extension tubes so I could get super close, but I had to be careful not to get any detergent on my lenses. I'm not sure what effect that would have on the element coatings on the front.

The above images have had the contrast and saturation boosted a litte for effect. I experimented with a white and dark blue background. The green you can see in the shots is the pool of detergent in the bowl. Another experiment to return to and refine in the future!

P365 Jun12: Backlit Lum

Nothing terribly exciting today. I thought I'd experiment with backlighting a subject with remote flash. I got one of my larger anime figurines as a subject and tried to arrange things so that it hid the flash behind. I didn't quite succeed. That's the flash you can see between her legs. The front was lit using a white card as a reflector. The effect works reasonably well, but would be much better with a human-sized subject I'm sure.

This camera's sensor has never been cleaned... Can you tell? This pic is just of white card and set to show the dirt up as much as possible. I've been afraid to clean the chip myself, but sending it to the manufacturer to clean is both expensive and takes my camera away from me for probably a week. I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and buy some cleaning swabs. Editing fuzzy black blobs out of most of my photos is becoming a real pain.

P365 Jun11: Tapas with Daz & Col

In what was almost a repeat of yesterday, our friends Darren and Colin visited us this evening for home-made tapas. I was able to get a bit more practice with food photography and also with more traditional portrature.

P365 Jun10: Food & Nathan

Nomi's brother Nathan visited today for the afternoon and evening. He's a talented cook, among other things, and he and Naomi had a fun time cooking up a storm. I saw an opportunity to grab a couple of photos, and try my hand at food photography. It helps that Nathan really knows how to present beautiful food, but applying some of the skills I've learned from Strobist helped a lot too. In the end I'm pretty happy with my first real attempt at food photography!

Later on in the day, once it had become darker, I thought I'd try and apply the technique I used on the frog last night in a portrait photo, and Nathan was kind enough to sit for me. So with a darkened room, flash in hand, I opened the shutter and ran around zapping the poor guy. I flashed through an old frisbee from the left for the blue, through some cellophane from the right for the red, and crouched behind him with the bare flash bulb for the back lighting.

A little tweaking in photoshop (mostly to remove my hand from over his shoulder) and I'm pretty happy with the result! One of my favourite portrait shots yet. Nathan was very patient to sit rock solid still while I tried to balance the flash exposures in a dozen or so attempts.