Blog?

I'm very much digging the phunky photoblog site that Ianqui is using. I'm testing it out over here. What do you folks think? Does the photo actually fit on your page (I know that was a grief with blogger)? The small version still looks a little too big to me, but I really don't want to do a lot of resizing...

Tilt You Head 3 Dergrees To The Left And Cough

Ok, after updating the 365 page, I can say that it is killing me to not even be able to rotate photos. Cropping is even beyond me! Grrr...

Also, I am fairly certain, that I have become very fast and loose on the whole concept of what a day is. I think I lost at least one in there somewhere. My cameras still think they are living on US time, and frankly I dont have the heart to correct them.

Purple Haze

I stole the lightbox info from here and the photographing smoke info from here

Here's my ligthbox setup for smoke:

I've got a desk lamp and a slaved flash on the outside and a stick of vanilla incense with a black foam board background on the inside. People my not believe me, but I'm certain that the flavor matters :)

I think there are a couple of changes that I need to make though

- I really need much better light. the flash on the right is ok, but the lamp is pathetic. Stronger light would really help the smoke stand out more and would let my play around more with settings on the camera - especially faster shutter speeds

- I think I probably should have cut up the box lengthwise. The thing is that I'm getting a little more of the background in focus than I'd like. Part of that is because I'm not using a light sucking black fabric or something, but I think more length would really take the background way out of my focus area.Maybe I can bring the incense out a little further...

Ok, so I shot a couple quick ones so we could play with the photoshop side of this thing. The smoke is so finicky, and it moves so fast that I usually take a lot of shots to get one or two that have a couple of interesting parts. Click your lens onto manual focus and move the lens around to find the eddies. Don't worry too much if it seems you're getting a lot out of focus.

Here's a I got shot out right off the card:

Interesting but we can do better. I'll bring it into photoshop and crop it up to isolate the lower right hand corner.

The most fun is fixing the levels (Ctrl-L)

First click on the little eyedropper with black ink. That'll tell photoshop that you are going to select what you want to be the blackest of the black in your image. I would chose the little section marked 2 in the image. Then click the eyedropper with white ink and select the part of your image that you want to be the whitest of white - I picked the part marked #3, but it would probably be better to choose the part under "Click" in the photo up there. Play around with this a lot and you'll get a lot of fun possibilities.

That'll give you something like this image which has a nice black background (although I'd like it a little more black in the upper right), and a really fun near-oversaturation in the curls down on the lower right :


Which is fun, but we can make it more fun. I accidentally shot this with an ISO of 400, so it's noisy. I'll do a little smart blur to even it out a bit.

The color is easy. Just go to the color balance (Ctrl-B) and fiddle with the bars until you dig it. I thought the green worked well



The other thing you can do is color invert the image (Ctrl-I) before (or after) you fiddle with the color balance. That gave me a fun purple


Then you save it and pop it up on flickr and your 365 blog and it's your daily photo and a how-to walkthrough!

Like I said, I'm still not happy with a lot of the process and I think this can be made a lot better. So give it a shot and tell me how you make your smoke cool!

Lightboxen

Scrivener asked about the homemade lightbox I made for the smoke pictures. I got the ideas here (lightbox) and here (smoke). So here's what I've got:



It's basically just a cardboard box with windows cut out on the sides and top. I draped paper towel over the windows to act as a diffuser until I can get something a little better (tracing paper? sheet?). Inside on the back and bottom are chucks of black foamboard. Then there's a lamp on the left and an old slave flash on the right in addition to the diffused hotshoe flash on the camera itself.

The setup didn't work that well actually though. I think with a little tweaking it'll get better. The main problem was that there still wasn't as much light as I would have liked for the smoke. The on-camera flash was also too direct, even with my bounce diffuser. I think the answer is to get a shop lamp, or something like that - something with a little more umph than my little desk lamp.

As for the smoke itself, I used incense sticks poked into the cardboard. Camera settings were ISO100, 1/250 and my best ones came out at about f11 or f14, but I'm sure that could be changed a lot.

Finally I popped it into Photoshop and fiddled with the colors. Fair warning - clean your glass. every tiny little dust speck will show up :)

Anyway, if you aren't checking out my photo365 or flickr pages, here's some incense smoke!

I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, ABBA

Well, things are just whirling around like a tornado around a drug addled gay icon. One of the most exciting things is that since I didn't take any grades last semester, I don't have a GPA, and since I don't have a GPA, I guess all the little forms are defaulting to a 0.00 GPA. Nice. That means I'm on the Important Academic Endangered Species List. Now, normally, it would be hard for me to care about that very much, except one cannot be on said list and still be a TA. Neat, eh? We'll see how this turns out. Here's hoping there's a petition of some kind.

Also, while not particularly worthy of note, my journey for lunch today was paradoxically noteworthy. There was a magical coupon that claimed to give $3 off a burger, fries and drink at a local sorta-campus place in an area of campus I had not seen yet. Now, I'm not as thrifty as I should be (more on that later), but I saw this as a challenge. Woohoo! Road Trip! Except it's on a bike. And just me. And there wasn't any singing. Well, I take that last one back. I did sing quite a bit of ABBA. Not well, but there it is.

Anyway, the trauma was that this little, umm... for lack of a better word, restaurant, was completely hidden. Not only was it deep in the bowels of the land of Scary Other Departments, but it was nearly surrounded by impassable construction barriers. Guess how many I hit before getting inside? If you guessed three, you'd be right.

On the plus side, I got my cheap burger, which wasn't so bad, fries, which were so-so, but came with a fun peppery powder, and soda, which was, as is standard for most fountain service, really crappy. On top of that, I got today's 365 photo, which was posted on the wall outside. The sign raises more questions than it answers. Truly perplexing.

Maybe I'll leave the story of my lack of thriftiness for another post. It should get here next week, anyway. :)

Photo365 Blog

The Brightest of Stars has decided to start a Photo365 blog (hers is here) and I think the idea is just so peachy, I've gone ahead and stolen it! So here's my day #1!

Anyone what to start a pool to see how long it lasts before I give up? Everyone put in a nickel and guess the date!