Night Light Fun

I went out yesterday evening to do some night photography with Jez from jezwhitworth.co.uk. We had planned to do some night sky / lunar photography but as usual the British weather was a let down and it was over cast.

But, not ones to be beaten we still headed out with our kit to the Clarendon Palace Ruins just outside Salisbury.

Had a really enjoyable evening playing around with cameras, flashguns, torches and LED rings. We did most of the shots on Jez's camera so look forward to seeing how they turned out but here are a few that I did take.

This is me on the DIY LED ring and Jez light painting the flowers


Another shot with the DIY LED ring


A quick shot of the Cathedral captured from the lookout on the way back home


As usual, click on the images to enlarge

Oil Painting

Had an idea for a photo whilst cooking dinner last night....Mix some water with oil and see what patterns you can make.

I had some chilli oil laying around (as you do) so put some in to a glass and here are a few of the resulting pictures.





As usual, click on the images to enlarge.

Shuffle Up and Deal

I have made an adaptation to my DIY macro-light which I used with the old Canon Powershot S2 to try out with my Canon Speedlite on the dSLR. I basically used a bigger bit of tin foil and added an elastic band!

I was just wondering what to test it out on when I saw a pack of cards on the side.

Here is a shot of my camera with the hi-tech device attached and the results of a couple of test shots. The second one really captures the action of the shuffle and the merging of the cards (click to enlarge as always).

Water Art

I hope that you all had an excellent Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year celebrations.

I have had a bit of time off work over the festive period and after watching this interesting video I thought I would have another go at photographing water droplets.

You can see my first attempt earlier in the year here.

I took so many photos so it has taken a while to trawl through them but here are the 3 that I think came out best.







If you fancy having a go at this then there is plenty of help at hand on the web. I found that this video was pretty helpful.

Cloning is a Crime

Sorting through some stuff the other day, I found an old BB gun which I thought I'd use in some photos.

Here is my attempt at a multiplicity shot using the gun as a prop - created by merging 3 photos of moi.

Making a Splash

I finally found some time to time to play around with my new flashgun. I wanted to test it out taking some water splash / drop shots.

Not a particularly fancy set up - just filled a pint glass with water, placed in the kitchen sink and got the tap to drip. I used a sheet of A4 paper behind the bowl for the background.

As you can see in the picture below, the result was ok but was not what I was aiming for as the background was all wrong.



So, I then reset the tripod to put the camera at the same height as the top of the glass and tried again. This was better (although the focusing was off) but still not what I was looking for.



So, I then added a blue Rosco photo gel filter (another recent purchase) to the flashgun and tried again. I was a little happier with the results. The focusing could still be better and I was using the built in camera flash to trigger the flashgun which was off camera to the right which is why there is a mixture of white and blue light plus the white streaks and shadows with the drops in the last 2 shots. Still a lot of work to do to get some results that I'll be really pleased with but not too bad for a first attempt with a basic setup.

New Flashgun

I have been wanting to get hold of a flashgun for some time now as I'm an avid reader of Strobist.com and also fans of various flickrites that use off camera flashguns to create some excellent and artistic effects.

I really wanted a Canon flashgun but both the Canon Speedlite 580EX and the 430EX are currently out of my price range so I thought I'd get a 3rd party one which I can always use as a slave in the future when I can afford more than one!

So, on a bit of an impulse purchase I bought a Nissin Di622 Canon compatible flashgun. I'm fairly pleased with it so far although haven't played with it too much yet. The only disappointment is that it is not compatible with cheap ebay wireless flash controllers. So, for off camera flash I need to trigger it with the cameras built in flash or manually press a button on the gun! This is mainly a problem as you may not always want light on the subject from the front. Still, I'm working on a cheap solution which may avoid this but long term my plan is to get at least one more flashgun then that can be used to trigger the Nissin.