Splash 2: the coronets

Here are some more water droplet photos. I'm experimenting with some different techniques. I have a few more refinements in mind for the next time.

Splash

I've wanted to try this for a long time. There are a million web pages on how to do it; here's one. There are a few tricks to it. One is to shoot a lot, since most of them will be duds.



I was hoping to get that classic crown splash, but this is about as close as I came. Actually, I had one that was a better splash, but the lighting was terrible.

Bear Mountain Lookout

Here's the view from atop Bear Mountain Lookout in the Black Hills. This is a composite of 11 photographs. I used Hugin to stitch them together. Click the photo to see a slightly bigger version.

Kristopher clued me in on Hugin. He has some nice panoramas on his blog. I like this one of the HHH Metrodome.

UPDATE: I replaced the photo with a bigger one. Click on it to see.

Also, some notes on how I made this: I didn't use a tripod. I was fairly careful to keep the horizon straight as I turned and took each photo. I was on manual exposure to avoid differences between the sections of the final result. I was not on manual white balance, though I probably should have been. In this case, it didn't seem to matter much. I took many more photos than would be strictly necessary -- I think about double. That probably made for better results. Another thing I wish I'd done -- take the photos in portrait mode rather than landscape. I could have included more on both the top & bottom of the photo.

I found Hugin very easy to use. I had previously tried version 0.6; the current 0.7 gave me much better results, and is easier to use. It has weird display problem: when selecting control points (this is where you tell the program where the same point, e.g. the tip of a tree, is on two adjacent photos), it would sometimes obscure part of the screen with a partial copy of the photo. I worked around it by just knowing where the hidden "add" button was, and clicking there. I don't know if this is a Mac OS X-specific problem.

I didn't read any of the documentation or look at any examples. I was clicking away ignorantly the whole time, and it still gave me pretty good results. If you look very closely, you can find a spot or two where the stitching doesn't quite match up. I went back and added a few more control points in one case, which made it better but certainly not perfect.

Bottom line: Try it! It's really fun. You might want something faster than an old memory-starved iMac G4, though.

Stupid flash tricks

I bought an old Nikon SB-26 flash on Ebay, and, serious photographic artist that I am, the first thing I tried was a dumb, gimmicky shot.

2nd Triennial Bee Photo

The bees have arrived at our crab apple tree again. Who knows if they'll make it back to the hive.

The wind made it tricky to get good shots, but I lucked out and got this one in mid-flight.

George VI

What's more annoying than getting Canadian coins in change? I always think "Well, there's another coin I can't use in the vending machine to buy Cheetos!"

Canadian pennies are OK, though, since U.S. pennies are just as useless, Cheetos-wise.

The other day I glanced at my change, and saw the familiar maple leaves -- wait, this is a Canadian coin. Make that "leafs." It looked a little old, but I didn't bother to look at the date. I flipped it over, and saw not Queen Elizabeth II, but King George VI. I flipped it back over again, and saw it was from 1942.



I took these photos with our brand-new used Nikon D50, my old Nikkor 35-70 2.8D lens in macro mode, and an improvised light tent made of a table lamp and a piece of white paper. Aperture-priority auto exposure at f/11, +1.0 exposure compensation (the backgound, our kitchen table, was much lighter than the coin, and so threw off the exposure a bit). 3 seconds for the obverse; 2.5 seconds for the reverse. ISO 200.

UPDATE: The "KG" on the reverse refers to the designer, George Kruger-Gray. "GEORGIVS VI D:G: REX ET IND:IMP:" on the obverse is for "Georgius VI, Dei Gratia, Rex et Indiae Imperator," or "George VI, by the grace of God, King and Emperor of India."