Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

A different version of the night stand still life.  This time not rotated to crop out a coaster or two.  Instead I used CS5’s new content aware fill to remove them.  Just lasso the offending coasters and use the fill.  Then just a bit of tidying.

In 13 days I’ll have to buy CS5.

Not a great photo but I’ve been playing with trying to achieve the look of metal lately.

I love these things for creative lighting.  So bright an small.  They throw a lot of light and you can hide them in a lot of places.  I used one once on my guitar, amp and booze photo to just add some highlights.  I saw the light through my fish oil pills today and decided to shoot them.  I put two LED flashlights under the jar and took a few.

Here is the setup…

Just two LED lights in a cup.

It was all of $10 at National Camera.  F2.8 ISO 3200 sample below.

I tossed the extension tube from my 50mm f3.5 macro on the Vivitar and tried this one.  The top of the rose is cut off but it was the only time I was able to keep it in focus.  (Handholding the damned thing and all.)

The new rendering really is better.  Just at the defaults this is much nicer.

I like the noise reduction.  Here is one of my desk shot at ISO 3200.  (Tethered to LR.  Also a new feature.)

Hunt it down at labs.adobe.com.

Picked this up with the lifesize converter for $60.  Good price considering they are $84 at KEH.

The f1.7 has the advantage of being f1.7.  But this lens seems to be very sharp even wide open.

Got my adapter the other day.  It is not that easy to focus.  I think  it might be that I’m trying very precise focusing and at pretty low (indoor) light.  Definitely is a cheap lens made in the 80s.  But I can get much better lenses for pretty cheap.  Need to do some ebay and/or KEH shopping.

I ordered a Minolta MD MC to Micro 4/3 Mount Adapter from Rainbowimaging on ebay.  $37 shipped.

If it actually arrives (no reason to assume that it won’t) and it works it’ll let me attach old Minolta manual focus (MD or MC mount) lenses to my Panasonic G1.  It is a cheap way of getting big aperture lenses on my G1.

As I already have a Minolta MD 50mm f1.7 I can try it right away and if it works I’ll pick up some cheap lenses from KEH or ebay.  I’ve seen a few that are interesting for as low as $30.

I didn’t realize you could make an embedded slideshow with flickr.

Edit: Okay, I’ve figured out how to change the size of the slide show.  What I haven’t figured out how to do is how to disable the embiggen small images option that is set by default.  This seems like a perfectly cromulent thing to want to do but does not appear to be possible.

The problem with frozen food is that, if it isn’t something you cook, waiting for it to thaw can take forever.  Microwaving a burrito takes 5 minutes.  Waiting for frozen fruit to thaw is a PITA.

On camera flash (430ex) bounced off the ceiling.  Fruit in bowl on top of foam core.  (I really need to work on my flash skills.)

Was looking for a high key photo I took a while ago.  It was not in my image library.  Found it in a desktop folder along with a few other images.  I was curious if this one was salvageable.  It wasn’t but here it is anyway.

I had to go B+W because I had brutalized the color trying to pull in the shadows and highlights.  I did the sepia highlights to move the burned out area off of 255/255/255 (ie pure white).  I did the duo tone because I wanted the cool interior to offset the warm outside light.  I darkened the corners to further remove some of the burn.   In the end just not enough detail in the highlights.  (I think the shadows are fine.)

I do like the duotone.  I think that worked.