It Snowed A LOT this Year!

Here's a picture out my front window.  I should have put a black shirt on, instead of my white one, before taking this to cut back on the reflections.

1/320 sec, f/5.6, ISO ~100, hand-held, polarized filter, taken Feb 26, 2011.  This is a composite of five photos stitched together with Hugin.

Smashing Bottles

My friend Alain had the great idea to try to get photos of smashing bottles. He supplied the room, bottles, lens, and just about everything else. I brought my flash and rigged up a way to trigger it when the hammer was in just the right spot. Here's the results:

All photos were taken in bulb mode at f/7.1 and ISO 100.

Not all bottles are as easy to break with a hammer as you'd think. There was one kind that seemed to be much thicker glass than the rest and would just bounce off the hammer and put dents in the wall. We finally figured out that taping a screw to the hammer would concentrate the force better. The first photo above is the result of this.

At first we were thinking that we would trigger the shutter to release as soon as the bottle breaks, but then realized that we'd have to compensate for the split second it takes for the mirror to flip up. We wanted to be able to trigger both cameras at the same time and it's likely that they don't have the same shutter delay. Also, we didn't have a connector for Alain's camera. So we changed our plan and decided we'd trigger the flash instead. This worked much better. We'd get set up and turn out the lights, then open the shutter on each camera, then release the hammer. As soon as the hammer hit the bottle and moved part way through it, the flash would fire and expose the frame. I believe the flash duration at 1/64 is 1/15,000 of a second so there's no problem freezing the motion.

Our makeshift trigger system worked much more easily than I thought it would. It actually worked the very first try! We were able to make very fine adjustments so we could control exactly how far through the bottle the hammer would be before the flash fired. To trigger a flash all you need is to touch two wires together. I had a PC cord that was plugged into my wireless flash trigger. I soldered two wires to the other end of the PC cord and then soldered a thick twist-tie to each wire. We used thumb tacks to fasten the twist-ties to the hammer support (seen below) at the pivot, one on each side, so when the hammer swung, the two would touch. As soon as the flash fired we'd close the shutters again so that when the hammer swang back again, we wouldn't get a double exposure when the flash fired again.

Snow

1/320sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

1/800 sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

More Fall Colours

1/50 sec, f/4.6, ISO 400, 18mm, hand-held

1/20 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

Fall Colours

It's been a while.

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 20mm, hand-held

1/800 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/30 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 35mm, hand-held

Bee

1/125 sec, f/16, 50mm + extension tubes, tripod, lit w/ Sunpak 622 @ 1/64 power hand-held above through wax paper with reflectors on either side


1/125 sec, f/16, 40mm + extension tubes, tripod, lit w/ Sunpak 622 @ 1/64 power hand-held above through wax paper
View Original

Behind the Scenes

Here's our little studio. The white paper was used as reflectors, wax paper was set across the two reflectors to defuse the light and the flash was held, by hand, above the wax paper.

The second photo is a composite of about 20 photos. Since the depth of field is so narrow, I took many photos adjusting the focus between each one and then pasted together all the in-focus parts of each photo. It could be better.

All the orange bits is pollen from the flower.

Car

Alain and I set out to photograph his car. There was a lot of trial and error, but I think they turned out half decent.

1/200 sec, f/9.9, ISO 100, tripod, flash SP622 ~1/4 power hand-held
View Original


30 sec, f/9.1, ISO 100, tripod, flash SP622 ~1/8 power hand-held fired many times from camera left to right
View Original


1/10 sec, f/18.2, ISO 100, hand-held
View Original

Apples

I'm trying to get back into taking more pictures and updating this blog more often. My wife was out and Reuben was in bed a couple days ago so if I was going to do anything it had to be inside. This is what I ended up with. For more info, check out Behind the Scenes

1/125 sec, f/36.4, ISO 100, 35mm (56mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right.
View Original


1/125 sec, f/28.1, ISO 100, 55mm (88mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right
View Original

1/125 sec, f/36.4, ISO 100, 55mm (88mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right
View Original

Behind the Scenes

Here's a shot exposed for the ambient light in the room. The apple was (badly) edited, otherwise that area would have been completely blown-out (totally white). It was about 7:45 in the evening so sunlight was still coming in the windows. The ambient was quite bright, I had to close down my aperture quite a bit (f/28 and 36) to block out the window light. With the flash so close, about 10 - 15 cm, 1/128th power was enough to properly expose the apple at that aperture. The flash was actually in the shot for the first one and needed to be edited out. A spray bottle was used to add the water droplets.

In the first photo, you can see that the table reflects some light back up to the lower part of the apple. For the second photo, I wanted the lower part of the apple to go completely black so I found a blouse (I think that's what it's called) in my wife's closet that's made of a black, fuzzy, light-absorbing material and set the apple on it as you can see in the photo below. This killed the reflected light. In the last photo, the apple was on a white piece of paper.

Bubbles

Blowing bubbles inside makes for a slippery floor.

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

100 Followers!

Yay! 100 Followers.

Thanks Everyone!!

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

Look at that, I took and posted a photo all in the same day. Like I said in the previous post, today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. So here is my photo taken with the pinhole lens I made for my DSLR. Spring is slowly making its way to my part of the world, so I thought that a photo of new leaves on the trees would be appropriate.

10 sec, f/stop - unknown, ISO 100, pinhole lens, tripod

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day! So I'm going to try to get out sometime today to and use the pinhole lens I made a while back, this will be the first time since then. I've been going through a dry spell photographically over the last little while, maybe this will get me going again. Hopefully I'll be able to get the photos from today up in a timely manner, my computer has been on the fritz lately. We'll see.

About Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day
Wikipedia Page

Splash!

1/160 sec
f/19
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

1/160 sec
f/14
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Behind the Scenes

Update:
Actually, the camera in the picture is Alain's 50D with a 50mm f/1.4, but the pictures above were taken with my XSi (450D)

Splash!

1/160 sec
f/16
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Bath Time

Reuben's graduated to the big tub.









All:
1/160 sec
f/2.8
ISO 200 or 400
50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm)
Sunpak 622 flash reflected off white tub and ceiling