00300 Little men

Found this great cheap way to make a little macro studio from the Strobist blog - what a fantastic resource.

So I got to nicking some of Cara's toys. Knights in Armour and palm trees are meant for each other:



Here's the getup:



Man, there's no fun like cheap fun.

Or expensive fun if you have the cash to go.

The Lomo effect came from this interesting looking page of Photoshop actions. More goodly freeness.

Oh, and I've reached 300 posts. I'll probably celebrate or something.

00299 Stick boats group

At the risk of repeating myself, I've made a stick boats group on Flickr. There's only four of us so far and with winter creeping in I can see pooh stick output diminishing. Hey ho.

00298 Time lapse dribbles

After doing this thing when Meriel's parents were over, I was determined to try it again. I still haven't got quite the right angle, aperture and scale, but it's getting there. Besides which, it's fun, donchaknow.

00297 Fish for everyone

So the trip we had booked in ages ago came up and irt was a superb day - beautiful sunny weather and a massive (by my standards) haul. I took so many home I could barely carry them. I caught mackerel, pollock, bream and turbot, the latter of which was coveted by the other "rod-heads" (don't know if that's a legit phrase, but it'll do).

Did take me around two odd hours to gut, scale and fillet, mind - I'm like an expert and everything now.

And I smell of fish.

00296 Cider strobe

Took my gear to the Foley's Cider press. Not that I had the time to do anything crazy, but I did get to try replacing the light from a standard bulb with my flash (with 3/4 CTO to adjust for the tungsten). Not awesome pictures, but a good start. Bare flash, too, interesting that it was probably the right choice, given that the place is normally lit by just the one incandescent light source.

00295 Bunker strobe

Really mean to do more of this, but my cactus remote is a little sketchy when around steel & ireon reinforced concrete buildings, so I just can't get the range and reliability. Also the proximity of my head to the camera/remote seems to affect the sync. Too close and it doesn't work. Anyhoo, perseverance gave me at least some for of result:

I'll be trying to extend the range some more and then seeing if I can't be a little more creative.

00294 Virtual slideshow gallery

I've got to suss out a better way to do this one. If I could capture a higher resolution animation of the sketchup walkthroughs, I could upscale the quality of this virtual gallery:



The idea (badly represented here) is to have a small room into which you walk. Inside the room chambers lead off left and right to different sets. A bit like a Tardis. I reckon it's just about possible.

00293 Mod the 'mote

The flash trigger I bough was the cheapo version - the alternative being the £300 version, so it doesn't have the 1600 foot range of the expensive one. But it's better now.

There's loads of tutorials about how to mod them, so I bought myself a nice little 433 MHz helical antenna, glued a 4mm nut to the inside of the remote's transmitter casing after drilling a hole for the antenna's thread. Then I soldered a length of wire to the PCB of the transmitter and the other end to the nut and there you go.

Originally I'd get around 15 feet away before the signal gave out, but with the mod I got around 200 feet and could go further. Stuck the flash on a stand and raised it out of one of teh upstairs Veluxes to test it:

Well neat.