Some weeks ago, I submitted a photo of unfolded interior of a gallon-sized fishy cracker container and claimed that I would be making an on-camera macro flash diffuser out of it. This would be 365-95, if you’d like to reminisce.

Well, fast forward 57 days and guess where that former fishy-cracker container has been for all this time…

So I decided to spend a couple of hours doing what I said I was going to do, sort of.

5 or 6 hours and ~400 shots later, here we are.

First, I do quite like the light this mod gives off. It’s fairly warm, comes out in a tight, upside-down teardrop shape or in a narrow, open-topped strip, and is fairly well feathered, despite having very little in the way of modifications to it beyond opening the carton out flat and rolling one end around … Read More »

Not much to say about this one. I planned to go for a walk down to pay the rent, but then realized I needed (soy) milk and so took out recycling and goodwill donations along with the rent instead of walking. GoGo me for recycling and donating, and maybe I’ll still make it out to walk the streets of Old East Dallas, but I might just watch movies instead, even though I should really try to get some exercise of some sort today (and every day, for sure).

If I do go out walking, and if I do some shooting, and if I get anything worth sharing, I will… but in the mean time, maybe you’ll enjoy this one…

In other news, I’ve been craving meat today, specifically some crunchy barbacoa… I have no idea what that means, but I tend to … Read More »

I had several ideas for a title for this one… a) the Trial; b) the Mob; c) When Zomb-E Series Attack; d) Attack of the Zomb-E Series III: the Reckoning; etc. But none of these felt right, so it just gets a generic title.

Does this remind anyone else of a long-lost Tim Burton movie?

Anyway… Fairly nasty weather in North TX today. I tried to get some pictures of birds and trees and nasty clouds, but it’s really hard to control the Zomb-E’s focal plane at distances greater than about 5 feet, so that was a bust. I’ll keep trying with this, as I can almost imagine making an entire art career out of this one broken lens…

Almost…

If I wanted to make a career out of my very pleasant and rather relaxing (most of the time) hobby, which I don’t.

And not … Read More »

(For those of you who haven’t seen the Antonioni film of the same title, this likely makes no sense.)

I’ve done a bit of film-shooting lately with the old Ricoh 35-ZF, and I took a roll of Ilford HP-5 400 film to be developed and scanned, and the nice people gave me a 4×6 version of a proof sheet: all the images printed out on a 4×6 sheet of paper, 7 shots per line, at something approaching 16x11mm.

I taped this proof sheet to something sturdy, reversed the 24mm f/2.8 on 104mm of extension tubes, and started looking…

Is that a body behind the bushes?

So this image began as a 35mm negative, was shrunk to less than half-size, printed, and shot at 8:1 reproduction ratio.

I had a tough time focusing, since the print is so incredibly grainy and blurry at these shrinkage/magnifications, and … Read More »

Families the world over are glad they didn’t pay me to take a family portrait today…

365.19 D7000 Family Portrait, versions 1 & 2

On the left: Nikkor 50mm 1.8G, Nikkor 10-24 3.5-4.5G, and wacky Auntie Holga.
On the right: Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series, and the LensBaby Muse.
Center: D7000 and his trusty sidekick Sigma 30mm f/1.4.

ISO100, 6 seconds, f/16.

It was a pain getting everything (sort of) in focus. Kinda hard when the main subject is about 3 feet away from the rest of the group… Is that the way mirrors work in photos? Is it focusing as if the thing in the mirror was twice as far away as everything else? I have no idea about these things, but that seems simultaneously wildly unlikely and completely spot on, so maybe someone out there has a clue. But … Read More »

It was such a beautiful afternoon, I wanted to go for a photowalk around beautiful Old East Dallas. Alas, my (not quite so mild as I make out, but still undiagnosed) agoraphobia got the better of me before I even got out of the apartment complex.

Oh well. There was some nice light streaming through the railings and spilling across the wall, so I made this picture and had some fun converting it to B/W in Aperture. Good times.

Now if only I could find a way to dig myself out of this fear…

Sigma 30mm f/1.4.

ISO100, 1/320, 1.4.