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This was my first time shooting fire dancers/spinners at night. Some post processing was required to get the results seen here.
I used my Nikon D600 with a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 "APO" macro lens with internal focus motor ($100 used on eBay).
I have a bunch of other shots of the firedancers in this set- check 'em out if'n ya like this sort of thang.
Photographed in Big Valley, California.
I captured these images when the dragonflies landed on the tops of some pieces of steel rebar that stick way up from a partially demolished hot tub.
These were shot in full daylight. I darkened the background by stopping down to F/16 or so at 1/500th, and used an on-camera TTL hotshoe flash to light the subject.
I got as close to the subjects as I could. The lens was a cheap 70-300mm zoom. It's closest focusing distance is quite far, so these images were heavily cropped from a six megapixel RAW, despite being shot at 450mm equivalent focal length.
This was my first time shooting fire dancers/spinners at night. Some post processing was required to get the results seen here.
I used my Nikon D600 with a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 "APO" macro lens with internal focus motor ($100 used on eBay).
I have a bunch of other shots of the firedancers in this set- check 'em out if'n ya like this sort of thang.
I just upgraded my PC with a used $25 quad-output video card (HP-branded Nvidia Quadro 440).
The LCD monitors cost perhaps $60-$80 total at thrift stores and yard sales. Two 19" and two 20"
I am looking for another video card with dual outputs, so as to be able to run up to six monitors.
The bright line at the lower right of the image is an LED strip light, under test at 15V, rather than the specified 12V. Total current draw is 1.1 Amps at 15V
The strip has 31 three-LED segments, totalling 93 LED emitters. Emitter type is 3528, each rated at 50mA max. At 15V, per-emitter current is 36mA.
Nikon D600
Holga HPL-N pinhole lens
40mm focal length
f/160 (.25mm aperture)
ISO 100
The Holga vignettes substantially on the D600's full-frame FX sensor, but I rather like the effect.
I've found that in full daylight at high ISO (6400 to 25,600), the D600 can do handheld shots at 1/30 sec., quite a fun thing to play with!
The attic of our 1953-vintage house in Reno, before our day-long blown-in cellulose insulation job. The existing insulation batts are mineral wool, also know as rock wool (I think).
The shiny stuff under the rafters is Reflectix, a thermal radiation reflective barrier. It works VERY well:
www.homedepot.com/b/Reflectix/N-5yc1vZ19n
8mm Samyang fisheye lens on Nikon D600
Post-processed with Photomatix.
This photo was made in September 1997 with my first digital camera. It was a SoundVision SVMini-2, and was made in the US!
www.dcresource.com/reviews/soundvision/svmini2.html
It had a CMOS sensor, a new thing at the time. Actual resolution was 960x800, and it saved the images on a small amount of internal RAM (Only 500 kilobytes, enough for about 12-25 photos!). It also had a slot for a physically large linear flash PC card, but those cards were VERY expensive back then, even if they were only of a MB or two capacity:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Flash
Image compression was a proprietary "wavelet" format that was claimed to be better than .jpg, which was then converted in the computer to an uncompressed bitmap or .jpg. No LCD screen on the camera, so it was strictly a viewfinder to shoot- check 'em later on the PC setup. Fixed focus, fixed focal length lens. Serial cable transfer, no USB.
As you'll see from my photos, image quality was rotten. And I had a weird compression level setting problem with it, so I visited the company near Boston, and ended up back in their tech lab, talking with a boffin. They ended up being totally mystified by the problem, and gave me a newer, better model for my trouble.
Here are some specs on the camera:
www.dcresource.com/reviews/cameraDetail.php?cam=73
It appears that the company may be defunct. Their website has not been updated for about five years, from the dates shown:
I did not keep it long, and did not buy another digital camera for a few years. The next one was a Nikon 800, which was a revelation compared to the old SV Mini.
Samyang / Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens.
The lens hood has been “shaved” to allow a nearly full circle image to be captured.
I removed the hot shoe and the original solid wires that ran from the receiver's PCB to the hot shoe. I then drilled out the hole in the receiver's plastic body that was formerly occupied by the hot shoe center contact, so the new 1/8-inch (3.5mm) phone jack would fit in it's place.
Stranded light-gauge wires were soldered to the PCB and the new phone jack, and the job was done!
The radio trigger set works perfectly like this, and is much more versatile, and safer to mount, too.
The previous photo in this set shows the outside view of this mod.
Here is a Strobist forum thread on this mod:
A Rethink Autism therapist teaching the Daily Living lesson 'Vacuuming' using a small area of the room. Eventually the student will learn to Vacuum the entire room.
Rethink Autism offers web-based educational treatment solutions: assessment, training, curriculum & data tracking.
The wimpy on-camera flash did it's best, but at the Samsung D53's base ISO of 50, the flash is just too weak to expose the room correctly.
I could have boosted the camera's ISO as high as 400, but that would have introduced a lot of noise in the image. This is an unavoidable result with any of the small point and shoot digital cameras, due to the tiny image sensor they use. So take the seemingly high max. ISO rating you see advertised on a wee digital camera with about a pound of salt.
See the next image in the set for results with an off-camera flash added to the scene.
A naked EZ relaxes in her hot-well-fed hot tub, ignoring the dark skies above. Tub fed by geothermally heated water (190 degrees F out of the well).
Bare Nikon SB-600 Speedlight to camera right, high, on light stand.
This set of three images is to show what can be done with an inexpensive point and shoot digital camera and an off-camera flash. This Samsung D53 has manual exposure and ISO settings, needed for best results with an off-camera flash.
The manual exposure on this first image was set to expose the view out the windows correctly.
See the next image in the set for the on-camera flash result.
This image was NOT created with a dark ND filter, rather by stacking multiple exposures together using the "Average" function of Markus Enzweiler's excellent program StarStaX, which can be downloaded for free here:
www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/software.html
The preceding image was a single frame from the stack, so you can see the difference.