Blog – Page 307 – James Cockroft

The Light Pipe

I’ve been back on my homemade trail mix kick of late, and picked up a container of Sunsweet Plum Amazins* to add to the mix this week.

The chopped-prune raisin-type things are tasty enough, and will add a nice bit of sweetness (plus some fiber and nutrients) to the trail mix, but what I was more interested in the packaging, especially once I peeled off the shrink-wrapped plastic label to reveal this nice, white light-modifier-to-be…

The container is a bit big for the SB700, so I did some tracing…

and cutting…

and trimming… and trimming… and trimming… until the lid just barely scrunched around the flash.

Fine so far, but the green lid gives a bit of a green cast to the bottom.

So I applied some black duct tape, which made the fit a bit more snug.

The light spills out everywhere, which is great for some applications, but maybe not so great for others, and so I set up a roasting-pan reflector just to see what would happen.

The constructing shots were made with an iPhone4 and the rest were made with the D7000 & Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, ISO100, 1/250th, f/8, with the SB700 at 1/4 power. These last two were ISO100, 1/200th, f/8:

If you have any questions or ideas for improvement, please let me know!

*I am in no way affiliated with Sunsweet, nor do I intend to endorse their products. Their choice of packaging for this specific product, however, is inspired.

365.65 1977

1977?

Yep. 1977.

Of course, I wasn’t alive then* but I have an idea that this shot of the pin screen has some resemblance to a fancy beaded curtain in an upscale club somewhere…

Maybe?

D7000, Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, Reversed, on 48mm of extension tubes. ISO1600, 1/20th, f/3.5. Altered with Topaz Labs’s Adjust 5 Spicify filter. And 100% Good Times.

*unless, by ‘alive’ you mean the twinkle in my father’s eye and/or the first ~5 months of cell division and specialization in my mother’s womb.

365.64 Agoraphobia

A brilliant idea for the 365 shot popped into my about 7:50am. It stewed all day. At 4:15pm, it was finally time to shoot.

I set the D7000 up on the tripod, removed the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 that pretty much lives on the camera (when I’m not shooting macro 365 shots, which pretty much means I use the Siggy like a giant, expensive, heavy lens cap…), installed the 75-150mm E Series (reversed and stacked on 48mm of Extension tubes), and started lining things up.

Then I noticed the way the light was hitting the pins and the reflection of the pin heads in the plexiglas screen.

So the early plan for the shot went right out the window…

Shame. That shot would’ve taken maybe 10 minutes. After all, I had all day to let the idea percolate.

This one took an hour and 10.

Oh well.

ISO400, 1/8th, f/3.5.

365.63 Pinkeh

I had designs on having some more multifun today, but I ended up liking this test shot the best…

D7000 and Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, Reversed, on 28mm of Extension Tubes (New!): ISO400 (forgot to reset it, again…), 1/200th, f/3.5, SB700 with its CTO filter installed at 1/16th power, about 18 inches away camera left, and aimed straight on, fired via that D7000’s pop-up, in Commander Mode and set to non-interference (and guess what! It didn’t interfere! But only because the pins aren’t particularly reflective…). The LED lightsabers were active as well, flanking the subject at fairly close range.

365.62 Pinned

Well, this marks the 290th post to this website… Not a huge milestone, but it also marks the 10,000th photo with the D7000 since… I’m not sure when. Maybe since I purchased the camera in June or July 0f 2011, maybe since I updated the firmware in October (that couldn’t be right… except I was in the 7700s in early February), maybe since I switched to using my initials instead of DSC, who knows. Either way, the odometer rolled over today. But that’s largely immaterial, I suppose.

More fun with Multifun and More Macro For The WIN!

The Setup:

The pinscreen on my desk, me holding the screen part up so that only the pins rested on the desktop.

The SB700 about a foot away, behind the rear left side of the pinscreen, at 1/8th power, triggered via the D7000’s pop-up, set at 1/128th power.

D7000 set for three exposures, ISO400, 1/60th.

The Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, at f/16.

Multiple Exposures delivered via changes in white balance: 1) Tungsten; 2) Flourescent; 3) Cloudy.

All in all: quick and funfunfun.

365.61 Power to the People, Right On.

Watch this first, then come back…

Continue reading “365.61 Power to the People, Right On.”

365.60 …Lest the Flames Consume Me

So I made some modifications to the CerealBoxStripBox(tm) last night: added a detachable snoot to help aim the strip a bit better. I’ll probably need to make a new one when I finish the next box of cereal, as this one has a few issues with spillage that are rather bothersome.

Anyway.

I was planning on shooting some test shots with the snoot, and maybe using one of those as the 365, but I started looking at the new shape of the stripbox with this rectangular box hanging off one side, and thought it would make an interesting macro shooting stage, if I could figure out a way to bounce light back into the snoot. Lo and behold: a strip of aluminum foil for a floor and an empty candy container (a foil bag) that I turned into a floppy sort of bounce card/reflector thingy a few weeks ago worked pretty well and I noticed that the multiple light bounces made some interesting reflections…

So out came the SB700’s CTO filter thingy and the LED Lightsaber things, and after a few attempts and wiggling the bounce card around, I thought I had it.

Alas, I had nudged the tripod when attaching the filter, and thus thrown The Creeper (the 75-150 f/3.5 E Series) out of focus… And once on the computer, it ended up that the foil floor didn’t really work that well after all.

So I pulled out a little polaroid photo-shaped mirror/frame thing (from PetaPixel), and that worked wonders, but I lost my touch with the bounce thingy…

Oh well. This one was close enough.

So: D7000, 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, ISO100, 1/30th, f/11. SB700, diffusion panel down & CTO filter attached, at 1/2 power, fired into the CerealBoxStripBox(tm) with its diffusion card in place.

And, if you’re interested, here’s the set up:

Edit: I only realized that I shot this setup with the memory card hatch on the D7000 open: idiot. Oh well. I’ve already put everything away, and I’m not taking it all out and setting up again just to give an accurate representation of the event. I really need to make some notes so I don’t forget stuff like this. Oh well.

Edit 2: And now that I look at it again, I wish I’d found a way to have the conflagration reflected in the mirror… Oh well.