Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

Just poking around the TRNP trip folder. Still haven’t gone through them all. Some more quick conversions. These from around the end of the trip.

Some comments on how I deal with sensor dust.

I use air first. (Via a rocket blower or similar.)

I stopped using brushes. I have a tendency to stab oily things in the mirror box before getting to the sensor. This is bad for the sensor.

I’ve a set of sensor swabs with eclipse fluid. These are nice enough but way too much money. I’m also convinced the eclipse fluid will blind me. (It is basically methanol.) At about $3 per swab I treat these things like they’re made of gold. Very good in the corners, tho.

I also use some product from Visible Dust that is just a set of medical q-tips and some cleaning solution. (Not methanol.) These things never make me happy when I’m using them because it just feels like you should not be working over a sensor like that. But they work great. I don’t think they sell them anymore. I’d probably just use a regular q-tip if they weren’t available.

Quick tip for these things …

Use 3 q-tips. Lightly hit the sensor with the first to get anything you do not want to grind into the sensor off. Work the sensor over with the second. Clean up the remaining fluid with the final (dry) q-tip.

Finally I have a sensor pen but haven’t tried it. (At $10 I had to add it to my shopping cart the last time I ordered from B+H.) I have high hopes for this. No chemicals. Should be good. Still a little convinced it will just grind dust into the sensor. And I doubt they are good in the corners.

Playing with my new $10 macro lighting box as described on Strobist. This is remarkably even lighting and a nice continuous background.

Just a test post to work on this template. …

Just posting an image to see how it fits.

So far so good. Need to add the recent comments thing and a couple of other things. There is a style sheet issue that causes the blog title to get cut off with IE7. I have no intention of making sure this works with earlier versions of internet explorer. Upgrade or get firefox.

I bought a new camera flash. Now I’m trying to really figure out what I’m doing with it. I’ve a pretty good idea when it is ON the camera. Now I want to take it off the camera.

Here are some great sites I’ve found for flash photography.

• Strobist – A great blog and flickr group for finding answers to how to light something. There is a great $10 macro studio listed there. (Cardboard box and tissue paper.)
• Flash Photography with Canon EOS Cameras over at Photonotes.org – This is THE reference for flash on Canon EOS cameras. I’ve searched for days trying to figure out things I found at Photonotes.org in minutes. So when the Nikon boys over at Strobist tell you to do something you can go to the Photonotes document to figure out how to make it work with Canon. Slow site. PDF is your friend.
• EOS Flash FAQ over at Bob Atkins site – Just nice and consise.

My 20D’s CMOS sensor is incredibly dirty. This is the before shot. Each dot is a dust spot. Your monitor (and this reduced size image) might not show all of them but I think there is somewhere around 125-150 dust spots on this image.

The first thing I tried was a rocket blower.

After that there is far fewer dust spots. Maybe 25-35.

I can live with this for now. But this is still about 3 times as bad as the camera has ever been. Time to pull out the methanol. (Which I prefer with a twist of lemon.)

I’m just impressed that the rocket blower did anything. It has never worked before. I guess the sensor had never been this filthy before.

The joys of digital. With film every time you click the shutter you get a new clean sensor (film).

Frontenac this time. Was really cold because of the wind coming off the Mississippi. Got a lot of photos from there but I’m still working my way through them. I can’t tell if black and white or color looks better.

This one is pretty simple, tho. So it gets posted. (Maybe I should have posted one of the Rushmore photos from my testing of my new flash. The Canon 430ex is highly recommended. Even if I really do not understand how to make the camera do flash correctly. If you just let the camera and flash figure it out it seems to work.)

I cannot believe I was rooting that hard for the Colts. Nice to see them finally get to the Super Bowl. Too bad about the Saints, tho. I wanted to see Duece make the super bowl.

Now the Colts need to beat the Bears so I don’t have to hear about Manning any more.

In Wolves news I flipped on the game and saw that Phoenix was playing Marcus Banks and Jalen Rose. I didn’t need to see the score to know it was bad. Wolves got stomped like a narc at a biker rally.

Saw this on a Windows Live Spaces Blog. Dunno who linked to it.

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1231.entry (Look’s like it is from some guy named Blake’s blog.

There are things there like SyncToy and other power toys along with themes, screen savers and all that. Very cool.

There is also a nice list over at Anandtech.com called Freeware programs and applications that has a lot of nice freeware applications. (The list was created to show free applications one could use instead of theiving not so free applications.) Some very good stuff in there.

Just thought I would share.

These were all taken in the middle of the (brutal) day. Hard to do much with that kind of sun.