Starry Eyed Surprise

I have been meaning to try out a close up of a human eye since I got the Macro Lens Adapters. I know that getting the light right can be difficult with reflections etc to contend with and wanted to try out something a little different.

I quite like the effect you get from ring flashes so started thinking about making one. After a bit of thought, I purchased some bright white LED lights from a well known auction website. I then mounted these on an old bit of ply board with a cut out for the camera lens and soldered it all up. I thought I'd start small with just 8 LEDs but will be attempting some more ambitious LED projects soon (I have another 92 LEDs to use up after all!).

Here is one of my shots with the DIY ring flash / light.



By the way, it is my bloodshot eye in the picture - Must have been a heavy one the night before :-)

State of the Union

Another photo from my archives. Taken using the macro light

Baby Spiders Again

I posted last year here about baby spiders in my garden.

Well, a year has passed and another batch have arrived. With the help of the macro light I was able to get these shots.

A view of the gate to give some perspective on how small the spiders were


Closer


Closer still

Creative Zen X-Fi

One of my Christmas presents was a Creative Zen X-Fi 16GB MP3 Player which is available from Amazon.

This is a great small flash memory based player with outstanding sound quality. It plays all the usual sound file formats (MP3, WMA, AAC5, WAV) as well as MJPEG, WMV, MPEG-4 (including DivX and XviD)video formats.

You also have the ability to to view photographs and the X-Fi even has a SD slot for extra storage or backup of photos to the main player. The only downside is that when a SD card is inserted it is seen as a additional storage so any music or files on it are not seen / integrated in to the main interface - You need to access it from a separate menu option. Hopefully this will be rectified in the future with a firmware update but is only a slight drawback (until I run out of storage space that is!).

The player also features wireless LAN functionality to connect either to Creative's content servers on the Internet or to your your own computer which can act as a media server using Creative's supplied software.

Battery life is excellent (over 25 hours in my non scientific tests!) and all in a package weighing in at just 69g. If you are in the market for a new MP3 player and are looking for something for its good functionality and excellent sound quality (as Creative players always are) rather than jumping on the iPod bandwagon then this is well worth a try.

Oh...and you can also customise the menu backgrounds etc to feature your own images. The pencil image below is one of my pictures featured in a previous blog post

Snowdrops

I keep seeing these snowdrops in my back garden and thinking that that I must take some photos of them. Quite apt considering the recent snow here! Saying that though, it has been nice sunny weather today so looks like spring might finally be approaching.

Post-it Fun

More idle hands whilst waiting for things to happen on my PC!!

Finger Clips!

One of my new years resolutions was to find more time to do the things that I enjoy during the year including photography (of course). But first things first, I need to sort my PC out as I have been seriously running out of storage space recently.

So I set about the task of sorting out all the old files and syncing everything that I still wanted to my external drive. Whilst waiting for all these file copies to finish and drumming my fingers on the desk I picked up the camera and started looking around at items on the desk.

This resulted in the following photo!!

Shell Shocked

More light box and supermacro shots.

Even More Macro Light Shots

Few more supermacro shots taken at work with the Macro Light

Laptop Keys


Dell Server

Red Pen Lightbox

Another light box picture taken with the S2. Red pen....reminds me of school!!!

Flickr v Zooomr

As you can see from my previous post, I've been using Zooomr now for around a month and have been interested to see the different exposure photographs get compared to Flickr so I decided to run a little test.

The test involved uploading the photograph below to both Flickr and Zooomr. The picture had the same title and tags on both sites and was not added to any sets or groups.



A week has now passed so here are the results.

Flickr Stats (my Flickr pics)
Views: 13
Favorite: 0
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Flickr Contacts: 90

Zooomr Stats (my Zooomr pics)
Views: 39
Favorite: 2
-------------
Zooomr Contacts: 30

As you can see I've had 3 times more views on Zooomr even though I've only got of third of the contacts that I have on Flickr. Also, 2 people consider the photo one of their favorites.

I would have thought that the more contacts that you have the more views you would get as I'm always browsing through my contacts photos (especially on Flickr). Apparently that is not so! Either way, 39 views of a picture in a week is pretty poor which ever way you look at it :(

Zooomr does generate more traffic (well, to that picture anyway) but that may just be because the community is smaller or that particular picture was of more interest there than on Flickr. Either way, I will continue to post pictures to both sites and see how it goes.

Don't Worry, Bee Happy :)

Managed to catch a few super macro shots of Bees out in my back garden the other day.

Pretty impressed with the results as they were not staying on one flower for longer than a few seconds.

More Macro Light Shots

Here are a few more super macro shots using the foil macro lighting device!

Coffee Filter / Strainer


Hand Written Note


Wood Screw

Macro Light

I enjoy taking macro and super macro shots of various different items but when close to a subject (especially in super macro) available light is always an issue.

The lightbox helps and a tripod can be used for getting clearer lower light shots but they can't always be moved on static, non-movable subjects.

So, taking some inspiration from Photophool amongst others I have made a virtually free macro and super macro lighting device....

It might not be pretty but it does the job.




Here are my first couple of shots with the new lighting rig!

Homemade Lightbox MK2

I found my original homemade light box bettered and dented in the back of a cupboard the other day so I set to work on creating a new and improved one as I haven't used the macro / super macro function on my camera in a while.

...and here she is in all her glory


Have taken a few shots using it so far...

Tablets


Retro Watch


Remember these!