Snapshot: 7500 Block of Rundell Street
June 27th, 2008 at 05:00pm
New pictures up in gallery
June 19th, 2008 at 05:00pmGot some new pictures up in my image gallery: Turlock from earlier this year (The Blarg had high def video posted, I’ll stick to pics) and My Righteous Indignation’s graduation/hooding/party. Enjoy.
And just a side note on the pics. I processed the heck out of the Turlock pics in Photoshop with a painfully manual workflow. The graduation pics were processed with the Adobe Lightroom beta and are pretty much straight from the camera except for a little cropping and white balance adjustment. I’m going to be using Lightroom some more and write up my impressions. The one thing I’m really liking is non-destructive edits; no more exporting to TIFF so I don’t have to worry about saving JPEGs more than once.
Southern California Cloud Time Lapse
March 30th, 2008 at 06:27pmHere’s another time lapse, this time I set a fixed exposure to make things look better. I did a 15 second interval which might have been a tad too long.
My first time lapse movie
March 29th, 2008 at 05:26pmI wanted to try some time lapse photography which presented a few problems. The biggest one was actually triggering my Nikon D70 at a programmable interval. There are commercial intervalometers out there but they tend to be pretty expensive. In Nikon’s infinite wisdom they included an IR shutter trigger instead of the traditional wired trigger which made things tricky. I ended up buying a programmable Arduino microcontroller and infrared LED. My sad looking prototype looks like this:
IR LED gets hooked up with a 1k ohm resistor and then I uploaded a program to the board that emits pulses at my desired interval. So here’s my first time lapse movie made from about 1000 frames, it’s a very exciting clock.
Human Jack-O-Lantern
December 21st, 2007 at 09:07amSticking a flash in your mouth and firing it at full power results in a very creepy self portrait. I like how it brings out my eyes. I did some tests at low power to make sure there weren’t any adverse effects like burning my mouth, but it only got moderately uncomfortable.
Macro Mystery #3
October 17th, 2007 at 07:55pmLast time was a little too easy. The shape of the tine and the metal gave it away, but if it was just a picture of scratched up metal it would have been too generic. This time there’s no dead giveaway and I got an old 24mm manual focus lens off Ebay to reverse and give me more magnification. Good luck! If you missed the first 2 Macro Mysteries click “Photography” over in the sidebar. If you don’t want to know what it is don’t click through to the comments. I’ll have to devise some way to let people hide their answers so others can comment without it being ruined.
Hawaii Panoramas
October 13th, 2007 at 01:51pmFinally got some of the panoramas I took in Hawaii stitched together and there’s 2 I want to share that I really like. The shot of the river was kind of by accident, we were driving on the bypass road south of Lihue and happened up a turnout with a nice view of the Menehune Fishpond and the river going into Nawiliwili Bay. The canyon shot is Waimea canyon over on the west side of Kauai; the drive all the way up is well worth it since it ends in a view of the Napali Coast. Enjoy.
Macro Mystery #2
October 4th, 2007 at 09:32pmHope you are already for another brain buster, just not quite as difficult as the last one. If you missed out on Macro Mystery #1 check it out for a little background on how I actually took the photo. This time around I used a reversing adapter that let’s me mount a 50mm lens backwards, giving me the magnification I need. I also used a tripod so I could fine tune the focus. So here goes.
Update: The image covers about 1/4 inch square and to keep people guessing longer I’ve made the text of correct answers white. So if you get stuck highlight the comments with blank spaces.
Macro Mystery #1
September 20th, 2007 at 09:55pmLet’s play a game I like to call “Tell Me What This Is A Picture Of”! I was tinkering around and read up a little on macro photography. Turns out you can stack lenses and by some sort of optical magic you get a nice super duper macro lens. So I opened my 50mm f/1.8 up to f/1.8, held it to the front of my 18-200mm, setup a manual exposure (f/16, 1/250), and setup my flash (1/8 power) to fire remotely off camera. My lenses normally only focus down to about a foot, even at 200mm that doesn’t get you terribly close. Stacking the lenses let me focus at a little less than one inch because of previously mentioned optical magic; only problem is the depth of field is only several millimeters. Such a small depth of field makes focusing hard, really hard.
Since Kevin doesn’t do MindTrap Monday anymore I figured we needed some sort of riddle posts going on. So who will be the first to guess what the Macro Mystery shot below is of? Hint about scale: The image covers about 1/4 inch square.
 Update: Paul wins and here’s the whole thing. The macro shot is of the scuff right there on the front.
 
Wild Animal Park visit
September 16th, 2007 at 02:05pmTook a trip down to San Diego over Labor Day weekend and needed to entertain ourselves during the day so we thought it would be fun to go to the Wild Animal Park. Got there in the morning but it quickly became super duper hot, but I still managed to get some decent shots. Click the lion for the gallery.
