After a couple of days off The Project, it was time to get a little creative. I’ve been disassembling more electronics, and one of my latest conquests has been an XM Radio. The big screen on the thing intrigued me, and I thought it would be cool to transform it into the big screen of a drive-in theatre. I found a bunch of small toy cars, and arranged them as though they were viewing the picture. But what to put on the screen? I had no way to drive it electrically, so I decided to “scribble” on it with a laser pointer. I’ve got no idea what those little guys are watching on the screen, but it sure seems like gibberish!
I made this image with my Canon 7D and Canon 24-105/4L lens. I worked the image Photoshop CS4E, using Nik Viveza and Nik Color Efex Pro’s Color Process filter.
The weather has gotten nicer in the midwest, with highs in the 50s, and lows in the 40s. What does that mean? Spring? Nope. It means it’s time to take the doors off the Jeep!
I made this photo with my Canon G10, and finished it up in Lightroom 2.
I picked up these baoding balls in San Francisco several years ago. The cloisonné finish has always intrigued me, shimmering the way it does. They also chime when you roll them around in your hand, which is pretty dang pleasant.
I made this image with my Canon 7D and Canon 100/2.8 macro lens, putting on some finishing touches in Lightroom 2.
Today, I spent the day working in the room we affectionately call The Dungeon. This has been a storage area and general junk collection point for the house. With me shooting more macro work though, I started realizing that I needed a little studio for in-house work. A lot of cleaning up later, and a little bit of reconfiguration, and I have the beginnings of a little studio.
As I cleaned up, I found an old picture frame that had a really cool spiderweb in one of the valleys of the wood. I thought it would made a great HDR shot, so I set it up, and starting firing. This image is made up of seven shots, from three stops under to three stops over the middle of the road. I made the images with my Canon 7D and Canon 100/2.8 macro lens. I brought the RAW images into Photomatix and combined them to make the image you see.
With spring training underway, and having watched my first Cardinals game of the season today, I thought turning my attention to one of my bats was appropriate. This bat was one of the two I had customized during our visit to the Louisville Slugger factory and museum last year.
I made this image with my Canon 7D and Canon 24-105/4L, finishing it in Photoshop CS4E and Nik Viveza.
Tonight’s image was just a quicky. I’ve been staring at the blue light in my eSATA enclosure for a while, thinking that it’d make a nice subject. And so it has.
I made this image with my Canon 7D and Canon MP-E 65mm/2.8 lens at 1x life size. I worked the image in Photoshop CS4E, Nik Viveza and a little touch of localized work in Lightroom.
Despite the beautiful weather today, I found myself once again playing with my macro lens. The subject today was a circuit board extracted from an old XM Radio receiver. Specifically, this is the area on the circuit board where the little rubber buttons contact it to signal user selections. To me, this looked like a crop circle dropped in a field of green.
This image was made with my Canon 7D and Canon MP-E 65mm 1x-5x macro lens. I worked over the image in Photoshop CS4E, using the Bleach Bypass filter in Nik Color Efex Pro, with a touch of Nik Viveza thrown in for good measure. Realizing I forgot to whiten the whites, I bleached them in Lightroom using the Adjustment Brush.
This morning was the first glorious morning of springlike weather, so I decided to go for a hike. I took a two-mile hike on the Woodbine Trail at Babler Memorial SP, not too far from the house. It was a beautiful hike, with plenty to look at in the early morning sun. Part of the hiking trail parallels one of the horse trails, which this bridge rides over. I looked back, and saw this beautiful sight.
This image is actually made up of six images, each shot one stop apart, combined in Photomatix, imported into Lightroom, and then tweaked just a smidge.
After a change of plans left my evening free, I decided to return once again to my goldmine VCR, and pan for gold. What I instead found was a corral of open-air coils that, with the right lighting, looked to be mired in a tar pit.
Once again, my Canon 7D and Canon MP-E 65mm/2.8 were used for this image. No post-processing though — these coils were drowning without any help!
