Day 10

Image 2014-01-10 Steve

No crazy explanation on this one. I did something weird with it though.. comment if you know what it is!

Day 9

2014-01-09 Steve

Half of the electrical in my house went out today. After searching for hours for a tripped GFCI, testing voltages in the breaker, and inspecting wiring I finally discovered that it was a tripped GFCI in the master bathroom. The circuit this little bugger tripped included:

Dining room outlets
Dining room overhead light
Kitchen overhead light
Over-the-range microwave plug
Outlets in the family room, including the entertainment center
First floor hall lights
Outlets in first floor hallway
Basement stair lights
Two outlets in the basement
Overhead flourescents in the basement
Fourth bedroom outlets (shares a wall with the master bath)
ONE outlet in the master bath. Not the GFCI on the left wall, just the GFCI on the right wall. *hangs head in bewilderment*

Photo365

Day 8

Image 2014-01-08 Steve

The drive in to work took about an hour and a half (compared to a normal 30 minute drive) and a significant portion of that was being stuck behind these salt trucks. *sigh*

Photo365

Day 7

2014-01-07 Steve

I decided to create a more spectacular splash because the wine glass photo came out so well. I used a piece of ice this time. As I was looking at the photo I realized that inverting it would really bring out the cool colors and the water spilling over the edge of the glass.

Here’s some others from the take, and the image in this photo without the inversion.

Photo365

Day 6

Image 2014-01-06 Steve

After several trips outside with the snowblower and a total accumulation of more than 14 inches, here’s what the mounds of snow next to the driveway are looking like.

Photo365

Day 5 Explained

Aside 2014-01-05 Steve

Here’s a MUCH better shot than my first one. I tweaked a few things that I didn’t like about the original setup and redid the shoot. It only took me about 10 minutes of slowly dripping water to get the shot I wanted this time, instead of the hour it originally took. I bumped the f-stop to f/20, turned up the strobe, and put a black reflector down to limit how much of the wood table showed up in the background.

The picture above shows my workspace for the shoot. There’s a cable coming out of the side of the camera that goes to my trigger. I have a wireless trigger, but I wasn’t sure how much latency that would add to the shutter release and we’re dealing in small fractions of a second here. Off the hot shoe on the camera I have a cord going to my SB-910 off camera flash, and then from there I have a sync cable going to the strobe with a softbox attached (the thing that’s all lit up with the modeling light). Normally I would just have the flash attached to the camera’s hotshoe but it was difficult making tiny adjustments to the camera positioning with the heavy flash attached. Also, I’d normally use a small low-powered flash to set off the bigger flash so I don’t need the cable (or use a wireless receiver, but again we’d have latency problems) but I realized I didn’t know half those settings for the big strobe yet so I opted for using the sync cable.

On the table, I place a baking tray to catch the water so I didn’t make a mess, and the red solo cup had the water I used for dripping. (You’re totally singing the “Red Solo Cup” song in your head now, admit it) I placed my reflector black side up to darken the background for this shoot. You can see a big difference between this new picture and the previous one. Most of that difference was due to the black reflector!

This was probably one of my more complicated setups. I usually just have my wireless transmitter on the top of the camera and the receiver plugged into the strobe and I’m good to go.

Photo365

Day 5

Image 2014-01-05 Steve

Today I tried to capture dripping water as it fell into a wine glass. I was dripping it off my fingers because I didn’t have a good way of photographing this under a faucet with the lighting nearby. I figured it would be fine to use my fingers, but then I ran into an issue of repeating the drips in the exact same place. My focal plane was probably only a few millimeters thick, even at f/11 and I still wanted the front and back of the wine glass to be out of focus so I didn’t want to go much higher than that. All that being said, I still think this came out pretty well even though the drop was slightly out of focus. I ended up using an unsharp mask to bring out the detail as if it was in focus.