365.26 playing with a magnifying glass and bounce flash

ISO1250 (I was trying to shoot in the dark, then added the SB700 but forgot to change the ISO :facepalm:. Luckily, the D7000 keeps its noise down fairly well, and sending to the interwebs at 800px wide doesn’t hurt either.) 1/60th, f/5.6, flash in TTL mode and bounced off the ceiling, so I bet it was zoomed to 30mm and firing to compensate for f/5.6 at 1/60th, whatever that means (and I hope to be learning soon… Sketching Light by Joe McNally arrived in the mail today, and I’ll be digging into it and Rick Sammon’s Exploring the Light after dinner, in lieu of stories on the tele (read: crime dramas via NetFlix), which is my usual after dinner-before-bed funtime).

Oh. And one other thing: A D7000+Sigma 30mm 1.4+SB-700 gets pretty flipping heavy after one-handing it for about 20 minutes, and when the shoot ends up taking closer to an hour, it makes for a sore arm… and a gnawing suspicion that I need to do some working out.

365.25 – The Cereal Box Strip Box

365.25 Candy & Cigarettes: Monumental Sculpture from the Cockroft Collection. (Yes, it’s a silly title, and yes, I could’ve done a better job with it…)

Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, at about 150mm, ISO100, 1/80, f/16, and lit with my new toy: the Cereal Box Strip Box!
All credit for the idea goes to Alex Koloskov, and the poor execution is all mine.

I pasted some aluminum foil to the inside of a cereal box, taped over one end, rolled it up so it would slide over the SB700, and created a diffuser out of some semi-translucent plastic drawing paper (called Yupo or somesuch).

It works very well, though I really didn’t use it to the best effect here…

And yes, I shoot everything out of my small apartment, which is often a wreck after an afternoon of shooting.

Bishop Arts Photowalk

So last night I was out shooting the Fort Worth skyline with the DFW Photography Club of Texas MeetUp Group, and I set the white balance to florescent to give the sky a nice blue color and generally brighten everything else up (a nice trick, as long as there’s not too much tungsten or acid-based lights around).

I shot full manual all night, and remembered to switch to Aperture priority for today’s Bishop Arts PhotoWalk with the Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp Group, but I forgot all about the florescent white balance…

Oh well. It made for some nice skies, anyway…

Fort Worth Skyline MeetUp

The DFW Photography Club of Texas MeetUp Group met up last night to shoot the Fort Worth Skyline. I managed to make it out, despite my agoraphobia, and chitchatted with a few shooters while I was there. I experimented a bit with deliberately defocusing, white balance, and wide/narrow aperture vs. shutter speed comparisons. I wish I’d remembered the remote release, as quite a few of the night shots were blurred due to my twitchy trigger finger. All in all it was a really good time.

365.23 Deliberately Defocused

Deliberately Defocused (and deliberately uploaded a day late because I got back from the meetup way after my bedtime…)

During the ‘shoot Fort Worth’s skyline’ Meetup, I accidentally took an completely out-of-focus shot. I liked the results, so I deliberately defocused the 50mm, and shot away. Good times!

50mm 1.8G, ISO100, 1/5, f/3.5.