Went for a wander around, as I hadn’t been out the house in a wee while. There’s nothing particularly spectacular but still, the shots are located hither.

This, in case your name’s Steve Love and you’re wondering where it is, is on the way up to Devil’s Dyke.

Fresh from my second failure at taking photos of liquids splashing, I decided to try my hand at something, while still experimental, definitely a little easier: strapping my camera to something in my car and doing long exposure night-driving shots!

I figured the passenger seat headrest would be a good bet, and bolted the 10-20 lens in place for wide angle loveliness. A length of CAT-5, wound suitably tight and wedged about the place, “secured” the SLR, and looked roughly as professional as this:

The remote trigger made up the final piece of the puzzle, and, whaddya know, it worked a bloody treat. Of the 105 photos I took, quite literally quite a few actually literally looked pretty awesome. There were a few duffers of course, but, overall, a resounding success.

Pretty much all of them are in le gallery.

So I went down to the pier and took some shots of it with a real long exposure, to see what’d happen. If you’d like to see what happened too, click the image.

So yesterday was the occasion of the first 365project.org meet up in sunny London, Holland Park to be precise. Organised by this guy Weng, I’d no idea who, or even how many people, would turn up, but went along anyway to see what’d happen. Blasted my way up there in pretty decent time, then got caught out by undocumented closures on t’underground and ended up over an hour late. Derp.

Turns out there were only four of us; Ross (the creator of the site), Weng and Alex. We wandered around the park for a bit, took a bunch of photos, Alex left the three of us to walk the streets where further wandering and photographing took place, then we went to le pub and shot the breeze for a while.

Altogether a grand day out, the results of which are somewhere around here.

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.

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!

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!

Two nights out in the snow with the camera, so far, with varying results.

Not sure yet why full auto mode gives nice white pictures and Av/Tv modes yellow-hued ones, but I’ll figure it out. Maybe.

180 photographs taken. 20 of them turned out to be just clear enough to warrant posting. Only just, mind. Annoyance

Tripod: mandatory for this sort of thing, it seems. Also, some of the shots weren’t too bad.