The Four Ages Of Sand

Unseen Chaplin film bought for £3 on eBay

Hard to believe something like this could happen but an old film bought on eBay for £3.20 has turned out to be an unseen Charlie Chaplin film! (worth £40,000...)

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/06112009/5/unseen-chaplin-film-bought-3-ebay-0.html

Answer to "What is it? 127"

Darn it. This was market tested on Uni M and Son of Uni M, and they both came up with "salmon" so I was hoping this one would run and run.

It's part of this...

 

Which is indeed...part of ...

 

...a Goose eating grass at Lee Lalley on Saturday.

Congrats to Uni C for once again completing the valuable ground work done by Alan. What a team. Chocs to be shared I think.

 

 

What is it? 127

Answer at 1.00pm tomorrow

Colourful star trails

If your camera has a Manual setting, stick it on a tripod or place it on the ground on its back, open up the aperture as far as it will go and take some long exposures. You'll be amazed at what you can see.

Stars are actually very colourful (young starts are blue, middle aged yellow - like the Sun - old are orange) but they are so faint that our eyes tend to see most of them in black and white. The longer exposures really bring out the colours. This was about 30 minutes:

This is the Milky Way. The darker areas in the middle are the dust lanes at the centre of our galaxy. Without these, the Milky Way would be as bright as the full Moon:

Jupiter's moons with the ultra-telephoto

Jupiter is still an easy object in the south and binoculars will show its 4 moons easily.  After some experimentation, I managed to get this with the ultra-telephoto at 500mm tonight:

 Now a 15X crop:

To the left of Jupiter is Io, and to the right is Europa (just visible next to Jupiter) Callisto and Ganymede. Ganymede is the brightest of the Jovian moons, and that shows up in this image.

If you do take the binoculars out, sketch the positions of the moons and identify them here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mjpowell/Astro/Naked-Eye-Planets/Jupiter-Path.htm#JupMoons 

Next I had a go at interpolating in Photoshop to get rid of the pixilated effect:

Magic! 

Nightmare Dodecahedron

Every couple of years I go through an origami phase. Now is that time...

Here's a module dodecahedron, made from 5 pyramids, each made from 6 sheets of paper. Yes, that's 30 sheets.

Interlocking the pyramids was the really hard bit. (No glue allowed of course)

More of the Moon at 500mm

I just took this photo of the Moon through the ultra-telephoto: (10.00pm Friday)

 

First success with the monster telephoto

My Sigma 150-500mm is proving to be a fantastic lens. With the aperture wide open it's a bit rubbish, and there is chromatic aberration on high contrast subjects, but close it down to f8-f10 and it really does its job. Also the image stabilisation is wonderful, allowing you to handhold at 1/100th of a second. Without the stabilisation, you'd be lucky to get sharp shots at 1/500th.

Here's the first successful shot:

(Cropped)

And then later this, handheld too:

(Cropped)

Of course, the Moon appears the same size as the Sun, so hopefully I'll be able to get some fantastic sunrises and sun sets.

For some more test shots see here at 4AoS Backstage:

http://iainpetrie.typepad.com/4aos_backstage/2009/11/sigma-150500-test-shots.html 

Simple pleasures

Ah, the bug season is coming to a close as Winter draws in. I had a fun session chasing flies in the graveyard yesterday, but these simple pleasures will soon be denied me.

Anyway it's not over yet; I found a bush with 3 different species of ladybird yesterday. Here's a 7 spot, stacked from 200 + images:

The fifth age of sand?!

 4AoSers will already be familiar with the amazing things that people have created with sand (The four ages of sand) now it turns out that a shy young lady, Kseniya Simonova, has done something remarkable with sand too.

Nick spotted this, and when he suggested that I spend 8 minutes of my life watching "a sand story portraying the human loss in Ukraine after the German invasion in 1941"  I suddenly found I was very busy doing other things  - tidying out my drawers, organising my CD collection, that sort of thing - but when I finally ran out of things to do (I only have 6 CD's; 5 Supertramp and 1 Abba, so it didn't take long)  I watched it and found it to be the most moving work of art I've ever seen.

About 13 million people watched Kseniya Simonova win Ukraine's Got Talent live with an extraordinary demonstration of "sand art". Most of them, according to reports, were weeping. The judges and studio audience sobbed throughout. Her winning appearance has now notched up more than four million hits on YouTube.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/27/ukraine-youtube-talent-show

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6208721/Sand-artist-Kseniya-Simonova-winner-of-Ukraines-Got-Talent-becomes-internet-hit.html

 

40 years of goodwi...

This was in a shop door in Penrith. The way they managed to fit all the words within the border except one made me smile:

 

How much??

We thought we might fly to Rome again in the next holiday (£39 return) but then we thought we might go back to Scotland and take the train this time.

 We won't book in advance, and we always travel first class. The Kyle of Lochalsh sounds nice, and we might go to Cornwall first. The cost for the two of us?

£2004!!

Britain's first £1000 train fare:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2009/11/britains_first_1000_rail_fare.cfm 

BFP Assignment 1

If you missed the post last week on the BFP (here) I've  started the  Bureau of Freelance Photographer's Shoot’n’Sell correspondence course. 

I'm happy to relate that I've passed my first assignment. Truth is, I don't think you can actually fail the first one anyway, but the tutor did say nice things about my photographs: "You obviously have a good eye for colour and composition, as well as the ability to handle different types of subject matter. This is the kind of versatility that can stand you in good stead as a freelance "

I've submitted these photos for Assignment 2 and now I'm waiting for detailed feedback on their saleability to stock libraries etc. Of course, I'm also composing my resignation letter to Enfield College, now that I'm almost a freelancer ;-)  

 

  
 

PS. the origin of "freelance" is really interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer 

 

It's cheaper Up North

On our recent trip round the country last week, we noticed that things were often much cheaper Up North.

If you feel the need to let your dog use the pavement as a toilet - and let's face it lots of people evidently do feel that need - you'd be much better off in Penrith. The maximum fine round our way is £1000, whereas it's an absolute BARGAIN in Penrith:

Actually, thinking about it, they never enforce the law anyway, so the amount is immaterial.

What it's like to… survive death road

Blimey, talking about transatlantic, how about giving this road a go? 

  
It's the wordl's most dangerous road, Bolivia's 'Camino de la Muerte'

Every year between 200 and 300 people die on the road, most in overloaded ancient vehicles which drop over the edge and disappear into the green abyss of the Yungas jungle.

Danger lurks on every blind bend. It's the only road in South America where you must drive on the left, but many forget this and head-on collisions are common. 
And then there are the cyclists. Adrenalin junkies who start at La Paz and freewheel down at breakneck speed. A memorial to a 23-year-old Israeli tourist on one particularly fearsome section is a stark reminder to the two-wheeled tourists of the road’s reputation. Elsewhere countless crosses and flowers mark points where cars, buses and trucks have gone over the edge.

For the full story, and an excellent piece of travel writing, see here:

http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/drive-smart/article/1201/ 

Thats not important...

An apostrophe? Many would say thats not important, but how hard would it be just to do it right?!

Uni M snapped this one, hanging out of the window as usual.

Vertical or horizontal?

The decision facing every macrophotographer at some point is whether to "go vertical" or "go horizontal."

Vertical means using a microscope setup, where the camera is supported above a trinocular using microscope objective lenses. 

This is what I've been using up to now. See here for previous post on my microscope setup. Psi Wavefunction: as a proper microphotographer, I wonder what you will make of my combination of lenses, cardboard tubes, duct tape, elastic bands  and milkbottle diffusers..)

 Horizontal means using standard or macro lenses and/or enlarger lenses reverse mounted onto extension tubes and/or bellows.

 Most of the top-notch images on the specialist macro sites use some kind of horizontal bellows setup up so I thought I'd give it a go too. My bellows arrives from China yesterday (£30. Bargain) and I've just received a specialist enlarger lens from America (ah what was life like before ebay?) and I've set aside today to experiment with all combinations of:

1) macro/tele/ enlarger lenses

2) bellows/extension tubes

3) apertures and focal lengths

4) natural/ artificial/ flash lighting + diffusion

Before doing all the serious comparative stuff, I tried this setup first:

This is Nikon D60 + bellows + extension tubes + reverse mounted Nikkor enlarger lens.  In this case, reverse mounted just means "stuck on the wrong way round with sellotape."

Using snoot flash, I did some shots of my dilapdated tortoiseshell butterfly wing, and the first results are very encouraging.

I took this shot of in the field some time ago, using my standard Macro 90mm, so the magnification here is around 1:1 on sensor.

Now take a look at the new bellows + reversed lens setup. I estimate this is now 5X on sensor magnification.

What you see here are handheld shots; no stacking or lab setups. Hopefully then, I'll be able to get shots like this in the field:

 
If any 4AoSers fancy giving this a try, all you need is camera with a detachable lens. Remove the lens then reverse mount a 50mm lens at a distance from the camera. A rolled up piece of card or toilet roll will do the job. Careful to avoid all dust or you will mess up your sensor. With this simple setup, you should be able to achieve similar results to above.