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Pose ideas book – P365 Dec04

Last week, I posted a photo of my camera bag and what I pack in it. On the flickr photo with the labels, I marked my pose ideas book, and flickr user stiksandstones1 asked me for more information about it. Thus today's post.
[flickr]photo:2091589917[/flickr] [flickr]photo:2092377352[/flickr]
Orion Visuals is my business name, and I've blured out my phone number on the front of the book. I attend the anime convention Manifest every year, and I take lots of photos of people dressed in anime costumes. Some people are natural models, and are confident in front of the camera. However, often I'll find someone who wants to have their photo taken, but they have no idea how they should pose. The pose ideas book was an idea I had to help out these folks. Being an anime convention, I used various anime characters as examples for poses. The style of poses these characters take can be very outgoing, expressive and even corny, but when photographing costumers at an anime convention, that's exactly the kind of pose that's appropriate. If whoever I'm shooting is having a hard time thinking how to pose, or even is just feeling a little tense or self-conscious, I get out this little spiral bound A6 laminated book, and suggest they might be able to find a pose within. This almost always does the trick, and takes a lot of pressure off the subject, who can then relax and enjoy the shoot. I may make another pose book in the future with human models, and with more conventional poses. I'd also like to add a wider variety of poses, such as sitting and lying as well. If I do so, I'll be sure to share it online. Don't wait for me however! If you think this is something that would help you, go ahead and make one yourself! If you do, please post here in the comments. Also, if you know of any good posing reference resources that readers might be interested in, please comment here also!

Vivitar flash hacked with phono port – P365 Oct19

I've had enough of the unreliability of the proprietary cable plug on my Vivitar 285HV flash. I've been putting off modifying it with a phono port like I did with my 580EX, but with the help of the Strobist discussion group, I found a reference with instructions how to do it, so I did it!
[flickr]photo:1774654050[/flickr]

This is before the modification. There's hardly any room in there!


[flickr]photo:1773807009[/flickr] After the modification, complete with my terrible soldering. [flickr]photo:1774656252[/flickr] The same photo as above labeled to make it a bit clearer. [flickr]photo:1774656878[/flickr] And here's the thing assembled with my modified Cactus wireless remote attached.
It works like a charm now. Completely reliable so far. I only hope my dodgy welding job holds. I'm a little wary of the cable being outside the flash. One good tug and it could pull right out. There was no room to put a knot in the cable inside the hole. I'd epoxy the hole shut if I was sure I'd never need to take the cable out in the future should it need re-doing. I'll just have to be careful with it! Welcome to Strobist readers! For those that are interested, you can see more of my DIY projects in the DIY category. If you like my work, please subscribe to my blog at the top right! I make regular posts with photographic experiments, and I'm planning to write more tutorials in the near future.

Dust cleaning – P365 Aug29

My camera's sensor was filthy:
Note, I said *was*:
And this is the piece of magic that achieved the above results:
The sensor of my Canon 350D DSLR (technically the protective cover in front of it) has been accumilating dirt and dust over the last couple of years. Whenever I change lenses, the interior of the camera is exposed, and dust can get in. This dust shows up in many pictures, especially those with even backgrounds, like the sky. You may have even occasionally seen large darkish blobs in some of my photos. Incidentally, if you want to see how bad the dust is on your DSLR's sensor, you can take a photo like the one I took above. Here's how to do it:
  • Put any lens on, and set the focus to manual.
  • Focus to the minimum distance and point the camera to an even white surface a couple of meters away, like the ceiling.
  • Close down the apeture (f ratio) to the smallest you can. Something like f32 or higher.
  • Take a photo of the blank surface and the dust should stand out.
  • You can even set manual exposure so the sutter speed is a second or so, then move the camera a little during the shot. This will blur out any detail in the background so the dirt shows up more clearly.
I've been reluctant to clean the sensor, as it is the single most important part of the camera, and if you screw it up, you can effectively destroy the camera. Most sensor cleaning techniques involve wiping expensive specialist swabs over the sensor, using expensive specialist fluid. The best price I could find locally for such a cleaning kit was $88AUD. Naomi, the online research wonder, wasn't content to leave it at that. She jumped online and did some research and discovered another option - a blower. I had been unconvinced by this method, because I thought that most of the dust would be stuck, and wouldn't be removed simply by moving air. After all, if others use swabs and solvent, surely blowing on it wouldn't be good enough. However, Nomi found a blower available for $14 including shipping from Adelaide. I thought at least it might get rid of SOME of the dust, so we decided to order it and give it a try. BOY was I surprised! The results speak for themselves. Sure, not all of the dust is gone, but most of it is, including the largest, darkest pieces! And they're the most obvious ones. The dust that's left will probably only show up when I shoot with a very small apeture - which generally only happens in macro shots. Thanks Nomes!! :)

P365 Jul25: Projector/diffuser

Sorry it's been so long since an entry. It's been busy lately!! I'll try and catch up over the next couple of days. Sometimes I get great ideas. Sometimes between idea and completion something goes wrong and great turns into not so great.< After using a dried flower arrangement so successfully to cast an interesting shadow for the backdrop of some portrait photos I took of some friends a month ago, I thought it would be cool to be able to project shadows of any kind of design anywhere I wanted. I came up with an idea of how to do that, and built it. The results, however, weren't nearly as good as I had hoped:

As you can see, the resulting shadows are very vague and soft, not at all like the shadows I achieved a month ago. A bit of thinking over the results clears up the cause. It's all to do with the apparent size of the light source. Because the shadow casting object (a pattern photocopied onto acetate) is so close to the light source, the relatively small source size (about 5cm across) appears large. The larger the apparent light source size, the softer the shadows. The acetate sheet is only 15cm from the light, the dried flowers I had previously used were over 100cm away. As a result their shadows were much better defined. At least I can replace the acetate with some tracing paper and use it as a small, compact softbox diffuser, so it's not a complete loss :)

Cactus Hack – P365 Jul16

The other day, the PC Synch cable which attaches the Cactus wireless flash trigger to my Canon 580EX flash broke. I've read on Strobist that PC Synch cable connectors are notoriously weak and unreliable. One clever member of the Strobist discussion group hacked their Cactus receiver to have an additional 3.5mm phono jack. So I decided to do the same! Since hacking a 3.5mm phono jack to my 580EX, I've not needed to use the Cactus' flimsy cold foot adapter, which I have since removed. That left me with the perfect location to put a 60 cent 3.5mm phono jack. I drilled out a slightly larger hole, pushing the drill bit to the side a bit to widen the hole in the direction away from the Cactus' circuit board. I used a couple of layers of electrical tape to cover the contacts on the board near the hole to prevent accidental short circuit. Before putting in the new jack, I soldered on the two short lengths of wire to the contacts, to save me from having to do that inside the cramped confines of the receiver. With the jack secured firmly in place, I cut the wires to length and stripped them. I dobbed some solder onto the ends of the wires to give them a little something to adhere to the places they would be attached. The trickiest part of the job was bending the wires the right way and working in the tiny space of the receiver case to solder the wires to the appropriate points on the PC Synch port. After two hours of hunching over the soldering iron, I had two Cactus receivers, now with 3.5mm phono jacks, and two custom male-to-male 3.5mm phono cables to attach them to my flashes! And, at least with the 580EX, they work perfectly! I was quite proud of my "leet hacking skilz". Unfortunately the PC port wasn't the only thing that broke the other day. For some reason, my Vivitar flash now won't fire when triggered by the wireless receiver. I can't figure out what's wrong yet, various testing has eliminated the receivers, the flash hotfoot and the flash itself (fires on camera and with test button). It won't fire via the PC Sync-Vivitar cable on the Cactus receiver. To me that sounds like either the Vivitar cable or the Vivitar port has failed. I'm afraid that I might have to take the flash into a Vivitar dealer and see if I can get it fixed under warrantee - if I can find such a place in Melbourne. Failing that I might have to hack a 3.5mm port into the Vivitar as well, but that's no guarantee to get it working!
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