This time to photograph a splash formed from a water droplet dropping into a thing with water in it. Has some complications…

• Shutter speed fast enough to catch the water in motion and not leave a blur
• Aperture f-num high enough to get the whole depth of the splash in focus

To satisfy these you need a lot of light and/or a high ISO rating, and I ended up using both, alongside some more white card to reflect a bit more light about.

Lack of secondary tripods meaning use of a PC case box to support the crazy lights from the light tent rig.

Using the chopstick to drip drops into the glass, hastily retract it and press the remote shutter release… about a hundred times, and we get this, which is almost mildly worth the effort.

Couldn’t really get enough of it in focus, and no more light sources to help boost it, and had other things to do, so that was that.

Got to reading a tutorial on how to build a light tent, and decided to give it a go. Locating a box was easy, as was hunting down some ‘bristol board’ to make the inside all white, as was cutting it all together. Sourcing lights was harder, as no readily available desk-sized lamp would take bright enough bulbs, as far as I could find. So it was DIY time.

Somehow not electrocuting myself, and making some awesome shades for them, we get this:

Turning on the lights we then get:

It’s pretty fucking bright, not to mention, well hot in there. Can’t leave the (non-amber) lamps on for long for fear of setting fire to the fabric. Still, with this much light, you can snap stuff at f32 (for largest depth of field) in 1/8 of a second!

Sadly I’m lacking inspiration so only have this to show for it, so far:

Which I’ll freely admit is wholly uninspiring, but hey ho, got to start somewhere.

Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Prague: Canon 1DMKIV from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Skywalker Ranch from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

So I read this tutorial for taking photographs of ’stuff’, specifically the glass section, and decided to give it a go.

Not having any sort of proper lightbox, but wanting to keep to a single light source for the best look, I wound up wedging my trusty maglite through some junkmail and resting the contraption atop some DVD boxes, to give a downward light into the glass. Turn off lights, TV, monitors; f32 on the lens, 60 second exposure; whammo.

Reasonably pleased!

Written by a 5 year old. Drawn by his 29 year old brother. It’s immense. Read it!

So today I picked up my shiny new 60mm f2.8 macro lens. I proceeded to spend about 3 hours taking photos of shit. You can see the results by clicking the below image. Internet!

You need to watch, at an absolute minimum, the first 42 seconds of this.

Then the genius of it will hit you.

Yes, at long last, thanks to the sterling efforts of these thoroughly amazing chaps, it’s now possible to express sarcasm on an Internet!

“HOW?!” I hear you cry!

It’s simple! You just send them the princely sum of $1.99 and they send you back a bit of software that installs the new sarcasm punctuation mark onto your PC!

Then your dreams of being able to use sarcasm online can finally be realised.

Never mind that for anyone else to even see it, they’ll also need to buy the thing. Just ignore that and buy it for yourself, and wave goodbye to wondering whether your own words are sarcastic or not!

Amazing!