(Sort of) Light Painting of a Light Bulb

I was just screwing around and thought I'd try some "light painting." As you can tell, was not exactly sure what I was doing. This is composite of 2 exposures combined in photoshop, each 30 seconds, f/22. First exposure I took with a piece of plastic over lens and tried to light the light bulb in a "diffuse manner." Second exposure was with clear lens and waived the light around the bulb, tried to define the edges a bit in the reflection, and then tried to pretend I was drawing a lit filament. As for light, this was little LED penlight I had cupped in my hands.

All very ad-hoc. @jonathanjross on Twitter gave me some pointers after the fact, I had some of the steps backwards -- will give it a shot next time!

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The Hero

Spent a quick hour in the studio. Still messing around with the turbofilter. This is blue perspex for non-diffused flash, and then a snooted Vivitar that has high diffusion on the lens when it flashed.

Trying to go for a bit of a hero/hip-hip-hooray look.

3/23 update: Bought the Jackson Pollock iPhone app, so I am now officially an iPhone expressionist! ;-) Straight off the iPhone, here's my Pollock style interpretation of same idea behind Hero photo in this post...

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HDR images of Tampa Sunrise Skyline

Another couple from the Tampa workshop. Pulling all my extra Tampa stuff together to submit into stock.

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Hypomania and the Hosemaster Turbofilter

Got bit of a brain wiring boost going on where I don't need much sleep lately. Tonight's exercise was playing around with a Hosemaster Turbofilter -- second time I really tried to explore it.

If you want to learn more about the TurboFilter, see my earlier post. The filter is a 90's tool, and photoshop is a lot more flexible, but I think this exact look is hard to replicate in software.


Series 1: I used 2 Vivitar 285HV strobes. 1 snooted and pointing at little man, and the other diffused onto mask. In all images, the little man snooted strobe was on setting 1 (no diffusion). In the 3 photos the mask receives no filtering, light filtering, and heavy filtering repectively.





Series 2: I used 2 Vivtar 285HV strobes. Camera right is lightly diffused strobe, camera left is bare strobe. In image one, both flashes fire when there is no filtering on the lens. In second image, the camera left strobe is fired when light filtering is in place.



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Embarrassment Redux

I went to Goodwill and bought some red high-heeled shoes. Made the shoe float in mid-air and captured this shot. 2 580 EX- 1 filtered and 1 bare camera right. White lightning strobe behind Perspex for the background.



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Twitter: RodAndCone

Twitter sounded like a waste of time when I first heard about it, but I've learned some great things from smart people now that I've been Twittering.

I have a personal Twitter at http://twitter.com/bwiederholt, but just set one up for the Rod and Cone as well. http://twitter.com/RodAndCone

If you twitter about your photography (or other stuff), I'd be interested in following it as well....

[IMPORTANT: Before you Twitter, please watch the following public service video. It explains much about Twittering, it's side effects, and what to expect from me and my tweets.]



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Tiny Planets

On last Summer's trip to Arizona, I took a bunch of 8mm fisheye panorama shots. Was experimenting around yesterday with converting them to "Tiny Planet" polar projections. The two images below are from the Wupatki National Park: the first image is a 28-image HDR taken inside a room in the main pueblo, the second shot is a 4-image shot taken outside the main pueblo (3 story structure in the background).


The polar projection work pretty well with 360-degree panoramas that have a lot of close, tall, structures, like trees, lampposts, skyscrapers, etc. After these experiments, going to take the fisheye out a bunch more this Spring to get some tiny planet source material...

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Embarrassment: Variation on a Classic

I hear about this "embarrassing moment" a lot, but I've never witnessed it. Is walking around with toilet paper on your shoe some sort of urban legend?

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Still Looking for Love

The other day, a co-worker mentioned his woes with Match.com. This photo even has accompanying music by Johnny Lee ;-)





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