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!

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.

HMS Warrior. A 149 year old ship. Awesome.

So a trip to Portsmouth was had to see HMS Victory, which some few-hundred years after its creation is still the official flagship of the Royal Navy. Cor blimey! There were more impressive things than Victory on display, as it turned out, but still.

A pretty good day out, gallery of ships (including some average shots of a couple aircraft carriers) here.

You might think having a Sega Rally 2 cabinet in your office would be cool, and you'll never guess what: You'd be RIGHT!

Today was a pretty fly day. You can tell exactly how fly by clicking on the above photo and looking at the other photos, with your eyes.

Fucking cool right?!

Mostly the day was about defining a couple of challenges (Desert track using the Scooby on the left hand machine, or Mountain in the Stratos on the right (due to the left one lacking force feedback, so keeping the challenges fair)) and then tearing it up to see who was fastest.

I’m glad to report the leaderboard for the Desert trial was mostly dominated by yours truly for the whole day. That’s just how I roll, etc.

Oh and we’re not sure why the full cabinet surround is missing either, meh.

So I’ve finally discovered (via Joe) a decent gallery application and can now upload my shit photos to somewhere a bit better than chuffing facebook, which resizes things far too small for decent viewing of proper photos, but with this it’s up to me how big to make stuff.

As with wordpress it’s a hella impressive little system, with adding/updating of modules from a web backend, which just makes me want to give up being a web coder, it’s that smart.

Anyway, three cheers for self-absorbed bullshit!!!

Below: four photos taken with my new wide angle lens for the 450D. Exciting!

Pictured here the This Will End In Dissapointment v2.0 keyboard... Wide Angle!

The (messy) living room... Wide Angle!

TV and more mess... Wide Angle!

Minorly messy kitchen... Wide Angle!

Sadly, whilst taking these I have noticed a ‘hot pixel’ on the camera, but I have actually seen them before on it in low light so we’ll wait until proper daytime shots can be taken before swearing and panicking, overly.