365.30 Afternoon (De)Light #2

or, “I should really think about cleaning my windows…”

The the afternoon light bounces around in fabulous ways here at the Grigsby. The shaft of light is a reflection of the sun, bouncing off of a decorative glass railing on the second floor landing across from the courtyard.

Since I started shooting, I’ve become much more conscious of light and the little tricks it plays, and I seem to be noticing more and more with each passing day. Good times and GoGo, I say.

And this was shot with the rather ignored Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series lens, at 72mm (ignore the exif: it doesn’t do ’72’ so I went with 70 in the non-cpu lens data setup thingy), ISO800, 1/320th, f/5.6.

Hipstamatic Disposable update 7 – the Unicorn MG camera

Well this camera was a waste of 99 cents. Jeez.

In one or two of the shots, I cranked down the effect, but I’ll dare you to find which one.

Yuck.

Oh. Wait. I found them…

Shots 16-20, second-to-the-last row on the bottom, and the last image in the third row up… the flower shots that are all the same, or roughly the same. 16 has the least amount of effect, 20 the most (obviously).

I like the border, I suppose, and the slight shadow on the inside of the frame, and I don’t mind the versions with no effect or even up to maybe 40% effect, maybe even half… any more than that, and this camera is utterly useless for my purposes.

You might find some use for it, maybe. And maybe I will as well. But I doubt I’ll be looking too hard… this camera is one to skip, unless, like me, you buy everything Synthetic puts out, or maybe you just like burning money. Sure, it’s only about a third of a cup of coffee, maybe a cheap bottle of water worth of cash, but it’s also a dollar to a worthy cause.

365.28 Supernova

And this is the fastest 365 shoot yet… 7 shots of the inside of the CerealBoxStripBox and this was number 7, straight out of the camera (or as straight out of the camera as it can be, given that I shoot RAW and downsized this from 4928×3264 to 800×530…)

I think this captures the light magnification qualities of an aluminum foil covered tube pretty well. Good times.

Sigma 30mm 1.4, ISO100, 1/25th, f/1.4, -1 ev (leftover from yesterday, and forgotten about until I looked at the EXIF… sheesh. When will I learn?)

365.27 Stop Popping that Damn Flash in My Face!

Ladies & Gentlemen, meet Olive. She’s really very very sweet, and terribly fluffy, but she would prefer to nap without being interrupted by a SB-700 popping in her face, even when it’s popping through a cereal-box strip-box.

Oh well.

Continue reading “365.27 Stop Popping that Damn Flash in My Face!”

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.