I was playing around last night and took some photos of smoke from burning incense. With a bit of Photoshop work I’ve got some really neat results.
Basically how it went down was like this. Three tripods. A burning stick of incense clamped to one tripod just off the bottom of the frame, a second tripod with my Sunpak 555 on it aimed along the plane of the frame (camera left), and my camera on a third tripod. I had a dark blue sheet far off in the background and a snoot around my flash to prevent light from hitting my lens or the background. The lens was stopped down to f18 or so and my flash 100% so I didn’t need to worry about ambient light at all (ie. room lights on). For focusing I found I’d just hold my thumb in the stream of smoke and focus on that because focusing on smoke is hard. Aside from that blow on the stream of smoke and take pictures.
This is just one that I really liked. There are several more on flickr.
I got the idea from sensitivelight.com.
We’re official two days beyond our due date and counting…
I rented this lens for the “freezening” and I love it. It’s capable of doing 1:1 reproduction which is pretty good. My only complaint was that auto focus seemed to do a lot of seeking in low light.
If anyone wants to buy me one for my birthday I wouldn’t complain 
On Friday (Jan 19th) we had our first “freezening” in my garage. Like the smashenings that have come before this event was a chance to break stuff and play with expensive camera equipment. However this time we had 3L of Liquid Nitrogen to play with!
A few months ago I had purchased a small 3L Dewar Flask (science grade vacuum thermos) for storing liquid nitrogen. I then, after much explaination of how a dewar actually worked, managed to convince Air Liquide to fill it with Liquid Nitrogen for me.
We had 10 guys with camera equipment piled up in my garage and from about 9pm to midnight we froze flowers and shattered them with an air rifle. The results are posted to this flickr set.
Anji and I ordered a new computer just after Christmas. My laptop is still good but hers was on its last legs and the other 8 or 9 machines I have make good servers but are not so great for modern desktop operating systems. It was definitely time to get another computer
This time we did something rather different (for us) and ordered an iMac instead of buying from Dell or building something from components. I was a little worried at first and not entirely sure if I’d like switching operating systems but I have to say I LOVE IT.
I’ve been using the iMac for everything, at home, for the last few weeks and it’s awesome. Everything just works right out of the box and the applications, bundled and otherwise, are definitely of a better quality than your standard Windows application.
I still use Windows at work and I’m finding more and more I’m using the wrong hotkeys for things since the Mac command button (which behaves similar to control in Windows) is where my Alt key is. I’m also really missing some of the awesome Mac applications like Quick Silver.
I really love that the Mac is Unix based and comes with an SSH server so I can login remotely and do useful stuff like transfer files around and view my address book (I’m using the Apple Address Book and a third party viewer called contacts that provides a console interface to Address Book).
It was even easy to setup the iMac to mount several NFS shares from one of our Linux servers (aside from some screwing around getting the UID/GID the same between machines since I’m not using NIS or other directory service).
The applications I use on the Mac and couldn’t live without:
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 ($)
- Bibble – Raw Conversion ($)
- iPhoto + Flickr plug-in ($)
- Apple’s Address Book
- Freemind – Nice cross-platform mind mapping tool
- iTunes
- TextMate – Awesome text editor ($)
- Quick Silver
- Usual Unix-y utilities like subversion, ssh, rsync, etc.
