10 days later

Petals about to drop...

more bright-field

Using what I learned back here to preserve a rather stunning bunch of tulips.

dark-field

during endSomewhat different than a straight dark field setup in that these were lit from the side with a pair of strobes in front of a dark background, rather than with a single strobe from behind the background. The exposure on the right has an additional small spotlight on the front of the mug in order to define the etching on the glass surface.

Interestingly, the exposure for the image on the left was an ordinary flash timing of 1/100 second @ f/14, whereas the image on the right was 13 seconds @ f/14. Because the light on the front of the mug was so insignificant in comparison to the flash, the subject is illuminated by the modelling lamps + the spot on the front of the mug.

Update on Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 05:07PM by KMW

There were several other iterations to this photograph. The one I spent the most time with was this one that uses a white reflector the exact size of the mug, which gives a consistent color to the liquid.

another during

bright-field

before afterEntirely too many How-To books around here. With enough time and dedication I'm going to become an expert at HTML, Javascript, Snow Leopard, video Color Correction/Grading, photographic lighting, motion picture lighting equipment, Cinematography, Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, CSS, Microstation, Autocad, etc. etc. Pretty much all of them are hard copy print editions, overflowing the shelves, only a few of them current.

Tellingly there are no Pop Psychology titles in the lot. DIY should not be confused with Self Help. I can't find a breakdown in the categories, but the Educational Book Publishing market in North America is worth something like $4-5 billion a year, most of that in secondary and university textbooks.

DIY is probably only a small fraction of that, but it seems I'm doing my part to keep publishers busy with new titles all the time. This work with "bright-field" strobe photography is from the inappropriately titled Light: Science & Magic - An Introduction to Photographic Lighting.

compair & despair

Canon 7D w/ Zeiss ZE 35mm; Red One w/ Red 35mm (no battery or viewfinder)

The Red One comes home for a visit.

enough about you...

While the carpentry projects continue, linger, advancing oh so slowly, but steadily, there are others that present themselves. This guy, Spathiphyllum floribundum,

blossoms only every other year or so, and you don't see the spadix unless you lie on the floor and look up at the plant. The latest idea is a time lapse of one of these blossoms opening. I don't know when it happens, perhaps even during the night. So it's set up in the studio with a one second interval. Tomorrow morning, when I have to clear out the room, should tell whether anything has transpired. Then it's back to the deck, to the final missing component.

beer:30

Carpentry time, once again. It's something I know how to do. But inevitably there's going to be some maintenance involved. It's no longer a piano - or the box it came in - but might be approaching a boat.

It was a tough day Friday: went to exchange some 5/4 mahogany for lengths that will work much better for the top of the handrail, which required yet another drive to Zion Crossroads. But at least Cody worked out an $8.92 refund.

2 important tools for any construction job

My layout drawing for the convex curve made me fairly confident that I could get the four required pieces out of the expected 1'-1" x 15'-1" board. This did not take into account the inevitable cracks and gouges created by careless lift truck drivers spearing the material with their forks as they move it around the yard. And as inevitable as these defects are, it goes without saying that they always appear at the center of the piece of material, usually in a location that cannot be cut out. In this case I had two curved pieces laid out along the length of the board, so naturally one of the apexes of the curves had to hit on the defect. Nor had I expected that one end of the material would be 13 inches wide and the other would be only 12-1/2. All of this to explain that three of the four pieces were indeed cut to the required size. But the fourth falls off the edge of the board and so may be something like six inches short of the desired length. Oh well, there are only so many things one can take into account, without making an offering to Murphy. I've got enough material to make the complete curve, but the joints may not fall where I wanted them, on support posts.

a bubbly beverage

"Seltzer" - 15 January 2012

the drawer

It's not like as if nothing as been going on around here. Obviously life continues, much as it's been in the past. The modern need to chronicle and broadcast every move is probably at an all time low. Well, that low must be in the near past, because here I am writing about some dank recess.

Several weeks ago I happend to glance at some notes from months ago. At the top of the list of things to work on, was an idea that began last summer, and the slightest periphery of it was glimpsed. Now I'm some ways into it, but as usual have no real idea where I'm headed with it. One step at a time, I set up the pictures and see what comes of it. Still working with 4 x 5 film, I find myself working on a composition, exposing one or two sheets of film, then stopping to take those exposures to the lab and see results prior to tearing apart the composition and moving on to something else. I'm obviously in no hurry, to find out where I'm headed, or to see the exposures.

It's not necessarily my intent to be as vague as possible. I guess it comes naturally...

...the contents of my drawer, a collection of odds & ends over some 20+ years with no discernable reason for their retention, other than they're too real to dispose of. The use of lights and an interior working environment has been a big change from the usual landscape work of the past. Here I'm creating small interior landscapes.

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