We visited family friend Jill up in Creswick again a few weeks ago, and I wanted to experiment some more with the low-angle fisheye photos that I dabbled with some time before that.

Jill has a very cute cat that I followed around with the camera upside down on the monopod, to get down to his level.

A fisheye photo of the inside of our clothes dryer.

Both the camera and the flash were held just inside the door. The flash was below the camera in the blind spot for the lens caused by the cropped sensor. The head was angled down to shoot at the (camera) bottom of the dryer. This made all the light bounce around nicely and minimising the hotspot reflection.

I love the science-ficion look to the photo. This is enhanced by the exaggerated saturation of the colours, which came out of the camera subdued, but I enhanced because I liked the look.

This is part of a series of unusual fisheye perspectives of ordinary objects. Here are the others from the series:

The mailbox.

The oven.

The washing machine.

Behind the steering wheel.

The dishwasher.

The fridge.

The microwave.

Inspired by the oven photo I took yesterday, here’s another HDR fisheye photo taken from an unusual perspective, inside the mail box.

Have a look at some of the other photos in this series.

A part of a series of photos exploring different views of everyday objects, this view from inside our oven is a three exposure HDR taken with the fisheye lens. Although it’s obvious our oven needs a clean, I love the gritty, grungy industrial look, and the dramatic perspective of the bars on the oven trays, pointing towards escape through the door.

These the other photos in the series:

The washing machine.

Behind the steering wheel.

The dishwasher.

The fridge.

The microwave.

An unusual perspective on the household chore.

I’ve already done the fridge, the microwave and the dishwasher. The washing machine doesn’t seem so odd then after all, does it?

I put the camera in the machine on the bottom (a pain to balance!), and the 580EX flash next to it. The Vivitar flash was on the bench to my right set to 1/4. The flash inside the bowl wasn’t illuminating my face enough and one side was being lit more than the other. I needed to use a diffuser, but I don’t have one of those Sto-Fen diffusers. So I just chucked a white plastic food container over the flash and bumped up the power to 1/4. With the camera set to self timer, I pressed the shutter, grabbed a handfull of clothes, and put on my typical “washing day” expression. Don’t worry, I took the camera gear out before I put the machine on :P

Just having a bit of fun with the fisheye lens from an unusual perspective :)

I balanced the camera on the dashboard behind the wheel, set the exposure to auto and the focus on manual. Naomi had the remote trigger and shot a few pics under my direction. I tried to get about a one second exposure to get movement through the windows. It would be better on a wooded road with trees closer to the windows, or later at night with more overhead lights.

Next time I’ll try it with a prettier car and prettier model ;) Maybe even mix it up with a bit of off-camera flash.

Another in a series of “I’ve never seen the world from that angle before” photos :)

Canon 350D with Sigma f4 8mm fisheye lens was placed into the dishwasher’s top rack, pointing down, wedged into the dish rack.

My Canon 580EX flash was also put onto the top shelf on the other side, tilted up to point at the reflective steel ceiling. It was triggered remotely via Cactus V2 radio triggers.

The lens was set to f22 to get the broadest depth of field.

I put the camera on 10 second timer and closed the door. The flash fired, reflecting all around the inside and providing quite even lighting!

This is an experimental idea that came together better than I had hoped! I’ve previously experimented with time lapse, which I enjoyed, and this was an idea that came to me after I remembered having seen similar done some time ago. I wanted to put my own twist on it, however, by using the fisheye lens for an unusual perspective.

I put the camera on tripod in the back seat with one leg on the central console, and the laptop connected to the camera via usb on the back seat. Then with the camera snapping away, I just drove around some of the local streets for a few minutes. I’m very happy with the results and want to experiment more with this in the future.

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Along with Sunday Links, I’m introducing a weekly “Tuesday Tutorial”. With these I plan to give you a guide to how to do some of the things you see in my photos. I’ll try to make things as clear as possible, and provide step-by-step instructions. The tutorials will obviously be from the point of view of someone who works with a Digital SLR camera, but many of the principles will apply to all cameras. Where possible, and where I remember, I’ll try to mention alternative methods for those who have compact cameras.

Due to the far greater amount of work required for these kinds of posts, compared to the daily photos I upload, I may find it more of a challenge to get something online *every* week, but I’ll do my best!

For the first few Tuesday Tutorials, I’ll be drawing from earlier work I’ve done, but these are in the form of cool videos. Please also watch the messages from the advertisers at the end of the video. They help me cover the costs of keeping this site. Thank you.

First up we have an overview of night photography and some of the basic principles involved. In the future I’ll come back and look at some of these subjects in more detail. Please enjoy!