fervocity

New website!

2009-05-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

Hello inter-tubes! I just finished my new website, check it out!

charlesmcnally.info

How To Resize a Photo for the Web

2009-02-21T12:09:00.000-08:00

It’s happened to all of us, at least once before. Perhaps you’re reading a blog, or looking at someone’s social networking profile. An image which you are interested in starts to load, but something is wrong! The image is taking forever to load, line by achingly slow line, and it’s twice as wide as your computer monitor. Three minutes later it finally finishes loading, and you discover that it isn’t the image you wanted to see anyway. Would you go back to this web page? Would this source seem very professional? Today I’ll show you how to avoid this mistake and properly resize your photos for the web. This will keep your visitors moving quickly through your website, and make sure your images and your design show up correctly.

How big should this image be, anyway? By now you should be somewhat familiar with pixels, at least enough to know that Jakob Nielsen recommends designing for a 1024x768 screen resolution - but ensuring that it scales down to at least 800x600. Take a few more pixels away for the edges of your design and the edges of the browser and whatnot, and we reach my rule-of-thumb bottom line. With the exception of select applications which require more image resolution and clarity, I try not to ever let the pixel size of my web-bound photos exceed 600 pixels in length. This usually keeps the file size of your image under 100Kb, which is a good thing. You can manipulate your image quality a little bit when saving and reduce the file size even more, but that’s a subject for many tutorials unto itself.

So now we know how big it should be, how do we get it there? If you have Adobe Photoshop, the answer is very easy:

1) Select File > Open from the menu. (Or double-click on the blank grey background in Photoshop.)

2) When your image loads, select Image > Image Size. (Or press Alt+Ctrl+I.)

3) Under “Pixel Dimensions” put the length you need. I used a vertically cropped image, so I put 600 under height, which automatically changed the width to 429. Obviously, results will vary depending on your image’s ratio of width to length.

Note: if your image resize box doesn’t show the little chain link graphic (which I have circled in red) make sure the “constrain proportions” check box is checked (it’s toward the bottom of the Image Size dialog box.)

4) You’re good to go! Save that puppy for the web using the menu command File > Save for Web. When you get the Save for Web dialog box, all you have to do is select the preset named JPG High and click save.

The Save for Web dialog box is actually quite powerful, and I’ll go into that in a later article. For now though, you know how to use photoshop to resize an image. Good job!

I like this quote:

2009-01-28T12:45:00.000-08:00

"One of the ongoing projects of modern art, and probably its most serious, is to tell what it's really like to be living here now - not what it's like on television or in advertisements, not what it's like to be a cohort, but what it's like to be a man or a woman in that unique body that's always living an odd life. Against the forces of false persuasion the artist offers an undeniable sort of truth, stated in simple human terms, minus the jargon and the emblems of expertise and false authority. It's always a voice and the voice always says: this is how it is for me, and I hope you understand."

- John Rosenthal

One year later...

2008-03-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

I'm adding a few silver gelatin prints (like the one above) to the Realscapes show and hanging it at Obento Sushi in Oldtown Eureka this April for Arts Alive. I'll be making flyers soon and hyping it on Myspace. If you're in the area, stop by for some wine.

Cheezburger Kitteh

2008-02-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

If anyone out there would like to help suggest a caption for this, I would be very much obliged. When I have selected an appropriate (and funny) caption, I will post it to the voting section of I Can Has Cheezburger...

Commencing Happy Dance Now, Captain!

2008-01-02T02:16:00.000-08:00

2008!

I'm changing my blog a little bit, for the new year. Gone is the limitation of just photography-related articles. My life consists of more than that. There is car and motorcycle rebuilding, graphic and web design, school, skateboarding, music and more. You'll see.

In other news, I am a happy Fervus! I just got a job at Waterline Studios, taking portrait photography of people and acting silly to make babies smile for the camera. To be honest, I'm very excited about the job - I get along with my boss and co-workers and the hours are perfect for me. High five!

Peas be with you all, and Happy New Year.

Will Photograph for Money

2007-12-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

Hey, all.... I'm super broke right now and I'm stressing out about rent and bills and stuff like that, so I decided to sell some prints on eBay. Take advantage of this opportunity to get prints of some of my most popular work for next to nothing!

There are four up right now:

I very much appreciate any purchases. Know that your support is helping put me through school.

Realscapes

2007-04-22T02:17:00.000-07:00

I contributed 15 photos to a show at a local non-profit called the Ink People Center for the Arts, in Eureka.

The name of the show is Realscapes, and its still up for the rest of the month of April. Ink People has a website, inkpeople.org; the April newsletter, which is available from the site, has a nice article about the show.

7 photos were HDR, 8 were IR HDR, and all were black & white. I printed them at Costco, because they a 40 year archival quality, at 12"x18". The mat board and glass are 18"x24".

It took me quite a bit of effort and investment to get this show up the way I wanted to see it. I used archival mat board/backing and archival linen tape, put them each behind a sheet of framing glass and museum mounted them (using 4 metal hooks.) In the end, I decided to charge $200 each. (Ink People takes 30% if they sell.)

I put together a Realscapes photo set on Flickr, if you'd like to see all 15. Some of the photos were uploaded as color, but all 15 in the show are black & white.

D.I.Y. Grid Spot

2007-02-25T03:10:00.000-08:00

I'd like to preface this one by acknowledging that it wasn't my idea. I lifted it from the wonderful Strobist.com who lifted it from someone else, etc...

The article on Strobist mentions using cardboard, but my friend Sheldon gave me some black sheets of corrugated chloroplast plastic for the purpose of cutting up and turning into grid spots so I couldn't resist giving it a shot.

I cut a strip off the corrugated plastic (against the grain, not with it) that was just a little bit longer than the head of my Nikon SB-28 flash. From that strip I cut nine 1-inch strips.

The strobist article says to glue the pieces together, and I probably should have, but since I'm lazy I just wrapped gaffer's tape around it tightly to keep it together. Another layer of tape around the edge of the first layer and folded down a little bit gives me enough of the sticky side exposed to keep my grid on my flash but not enough to get all stuck to itself and cause a mess.

Once on my flash, the grid spot is an amazing tool. I can use it as a spotlight to single out elements in a picture (even to the complete exclusion of anything else in the photo.) I can use it for side or back lighting to reduce falloff light and/or glare.

Here's an example of a picture I took using the grid as a spotlight:

I have yet to touch on the full range of uses for this wonderful little piece of photography equipment, but look for its application in my later work - it'll be there, I promise.

I've been published!

2007-01-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

My DIY Digital Holga article was selected for publication in JPG magazine. The article is in Issue 8, which you can preview and even download on the JPG website.

The article in the magazine is titled "Holga Hacking" and it's on pages 38 and 39. JPG Issue 8 is or will very soon be available in major bookstores (find one near you.)

2006: Wow, I Came THAT Far?

2006-12-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

This last year has been a crazy one for me. I thought I'd recap a bit, mainly because it's kind of hard for me to believe I did all that, but also to give you an understanding of where I stand as a photographer. I bought my first digital SLR in April, a Canon Rebel XT (aka the 350d), about 4 months after my roommate got one.

I bought my first medium format film camera at the beginning of fall, a Holga, for a photo class at my college. The class gave me access to a darkroom and developing chemicals, which was enlightening to say the least. Over the course of the semester, I proceeded to also get a Lubitel 166b (a box TLR), a Diana, and then another Holga to take apart and modify.

My favorite of those three film cameras is the Lubitel, even though mine has a problem leaking a lot of light. I can't fault it too much, it's as old as I am. We'll see if gaffer's tape works. Here's the only picture from the rolls I took using the Russian TLR that wasn't absolutely covered in leaks:

I also discovered David Hobby's wonderful blog, Strobist, and learned about off-camera flash for dynamic portrait lighting, which led me to buy a used Nikon SB-28 hot-shoe flash and a radio trigger for it from eBay.

To think that at this time last year I was using a point and shoot digital camera. Ah, that camera was a good one though. It was a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LC40; a 4MP point and shoot digicam, but with a Leica lens. I gave that camera to my sister when I got my 350d. I had many good times and travels and experiences with it, and I'm sure she will as well.

I feel that I've grown and matured a lot this year, not only as a photographer, but as a person as well. I turned 25, invested in an digital SLR, started taking all my pictures on manual instead of automatic, started shooting medium format film, and even learned how to develop and print it. I learned about pinhole cameras and tilt-shift lenses, witnessed the birth of the JPG magazine website (I had known it as a flickr group), and was published for the first time (in issue 7 of JPG.) I also started this blog and created a portfolio site for my art/photo/design work, which will be online mid-January.

Looking back, I can only hope that I will grow and learn as much in 2007 as I did this last year. I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year's celebration, with much champagne and good friends.

Speaking of Pinhole Cameras...

2006-12-20T00:53:00.000-08:00

I've been drooling over the Zero Image 612F pinhole camera for a while now. Unfortunately, due to the price tag of a little under $500, there's no way I'll be able to afford one for a long time (maybe if they're still being made when I turn 30.) Have a peek:

Every Zero Image camera is hand made and each piece of wood is hand-coated over 15 times. The brass pieces are hand turned and coated to prevent rust. It uses medium format film and lets you take pictures in either 6 x 4.5, 6 x 6, 6 x 9 or 6 x 12 format (that's centimeters.) Here's an example of the 6 x 12 from their website:

(The link will take you to their site.)

This camera is so beautiful, I could go on and on about how cool it is. The spring-loaded back to prevent film curling. The fact that it's built & designed to be able to warp and bend a little bit from climate change and not leak light. It's even got a tripod socket (which is important for a pinhole camera.) The wooden shutter. Wow.

In short, the Zero Image pinhole is on my rather short list of "things to buy that are fairly expensive when I finally have money." These lists are important to have...

Diana-F and the Importance of Testing Developer

2006-12-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

I bought a Diana for $10. It had a little broken part, so I tested out a fix for it with hot glue, and it worked for a roll. Next time I'll do it with epoxy and sand a little first. I also cut a hole in a strip of sticky Velcro and put it over the film window, then covered another piece of Velcro with tape on the back and use it as a cover:

As a side note, I learned an important lesson which I will attempt to pass on. For anyone out there who's developing film (especially in a shared darkroom environment,) MAKE SURE you test your developer every single time.

Somebody left a D76 jug full of water next to the jug that was almost empty, and I didn't test it... so my negatives from my first roll through the Diana ended up pretty much entirely clear. I say pretty much because there was enough to tease me and a faded bit of a corner so I could at least tell that the camera works.

As my photography instructor says... Bummer dude!

the Holga 169fP

2006-12-17T13:40:00.000-08:00

Yes! Finals week is over, and I'm still alive. With good grades even.

On one hand, it means that I'll be a little stressed out looking for a job now, (paying rent and bills is a good thing,) but it also means I have a little time to devote to my blog again. I woke up this morning and wanted to at least take steps on the Pinholga project.

There are plenty of great pinhole camera tutorials on the web, even one for a super wide angle pinhole Holga, the 120P19. But nothing I could find included the shutter. Hopefully I won't regret this decision, but I want to use my shutter. I will figure out a way to stop it down or use a cable release in order to get long exposures, and this would allow me to keep the existing tripod mount as well. Sweet!

I measured the focal length (the distance between where the pinhole is going to be physically located and the film plane, which was 47mm, after adding a little for construction), found a wonderful pinhole camera calculator that let me ascertain the optimal pinhole size (aperture) which is .289mm. This would give me an aperture of f/163.

My next step is to figure out how to get a hole this size in a thin piece of metal. To make life easier on myself, I decided to play around with the focal length by means of simple materials and black sealant (which I need anyway because there are holes left from sawing off the lens.) More on this later. So now I only need to get a hole that's .3mm. Should be a little easier. This camera now needs a 50.6mm focal length, and it will have an aperture of f/169. Hooray for pinhole on a budget.

I think I'll tentatively name this camera the 169fP.
Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

Testing Lens Bokeh

2006-12-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

You know, it didn't occur to me until after I'd posted my last entry that you really don't need to have anything in focus to test the Bokeh of your lens.

To recap: set your lens to its widest aperture possible and use manual focus to bring the focus up as close as possible (it will be very blurry), then take a picture of something with lights and shadows from a distance.

I tried this with the 50mm f1.8 at night, with someone's holiday lights from across the street:

I like the way this lens blurs light.

Bokeh De-mystified

2006-12-04T02:26:00.000-08:00

OK. It's only a word to describe the aesthetic quality of how a lens deals with the out of focus areas of a picture, or how well your lens blurs the blurry parts.

That's all. You would say "that lens has nice bokeh" or "I don't like the bokeh of that 18-55mm kit lens for the rebel XT."

There are lots of technical writings about how different lens manufacturing techniques affect the spherical blur donut (hehe ok, I jest...) but right now I'm primarily concerned with just what I can see - I don't need to understand how it works to know whether or not I like it.

Again, bokeh is only the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas of your picture. Pretty easy when put like that, right? As an example, here's my most favorited bokeh photo on flickr:

Now, how do you go about testing the bokeh of your lens, you ask? Most of your pictures don't have much blur at all! What you want to do is create the smallest depth of field possible, so set your lens to the widest aperture possible (on my Canon EF 50mm (which turns into an 80mm on my Rebel XT) it's f1.8) and focus the camera on something as close to the lens as you can.

Make sure when you take the picture that you allow for a lot of blurry area in the picture (in other words, don't fill your frame with the in-focus subject... that should play a minor role for the purpose of this test.) Also, try to make sure there are some lights and shadows in the blurry part of the picture. This will give the out of focus area of your picture interesting depth and movement, like this photo:

I have access to a set of locking "macro extension rings" for the canon ef 50mm, which allow me to get a pretty extreme macro distance and depth of field, and the bokeh is wonderful using these. Here's an example of dew in spiderwebs:

There are some instructions on how to make a makeshift macro extension tube floating around on the internet, I'll try to make one and post any positive results I have soon!

External links:
For more detail, try the Wikipedia entry.
Bokeh Smooth & Silky Flickr group
My Bokeh Flickr set, entitled Bokehnism.

Even More Fun With Puddles

2006-12-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

Well I finally got a chance to play around with puddles and flashes. By luck and chance I had a borrowed homemade snoot on my flash (I'll make one and document it soon) and it served the purposes of puddling very well.

Here's the first puddle I tried. This was with a Nikon SB-28 with a wireless trigger, held in my left hand under the camera.

Without the flash:

With the flash:

You can see that the addition of the dynamic off-camera lighting from that flash really adds a lot to a picture that ordinarily probably wouldn't get posted on my flickr account.

I wanted to play around with the effect a little more, so here's my second attempt.

Without the flash:

With the flash:

This time the flash was on a stand to my left, snooted as well. I would have taken more pictures of the area in general, but it was kind of sketchy and we had a lot of camera equipment with us.

Fun With Puddles

2006-11-27T23:11:00.000-08:00

There are times when I am very glad that I live in an area of the country which gets a lot of rain. (Actually, I technically live in a rain-forest.) There are times when the lack of sunlight during the winter can be a little bit of a drag, but it's all more than made up for in rare serendipitous moments, like when the weather in Eureka clears up just in time for the sun to create dynamic cloud layers and shine through, making everything wet-looking and sparkling, and creating interesting puddles everywhere. Here's an example of what I mean:

(The above picture has more comments than all my other pictures on flickr!)

Puddling, as I call it, is easy. All you need is patience and a little bit of time in your schedule. You have wait until the weather conditions are perfect for this. It has to be a somewhat rainy day, since puddles don't form until there's quite a bit of rain, and you have to be attentive and notice exactly when the rain stops, and if the sun comes out, immediately go out walking (although to be prudent, take an umbrella just in case.) Try to head to locations you find interesting just as they are. Chances are the puddles and the newly wet sparkle will make your scene more interesting, and create a more dynamic photograph.

You will get really lucky sometimes. In the photograph below I was walking in downtown Eureka and happened to see this:

When I saw this, it took me all of about 5 seconds to flip my camera upside down, line up this shot, take 3 or 5 copies, and then I was on my way. It was only later that I realized how surreal this photograph really was, and how lucky I was to have captured it.

If you're not fortunate enough to get as much rain as we do here in Humboldt County, broken fire hydrants, sprinklers, hoses, and car washes can also work well for this purpose. Early morning, if it has been raining at night, will find lots and lots of puddles, because the water hasn't had much of a chance to evaporate.

Also, try to walk around your puddle when you find it and look at it from all angles, near and far, high and low. Sometimes you have to get right down so that your camera is almost touching the water in order to get the perspective for a good shot, like this shot of the sunset in Eureka:

Other times you will find random objects floating in your puddles, and clever alignment can suggest a different size or position at first before the brain can fully explain what it sees. An isolated puddle can offer a window into a colorful world from a street or gutter, and paying attention to color can also offer very interesting results.

You can also modify your puddles, and add anything from props to models. I did a set last year of my friend H posing around a number of puddles in Eureka. I had a lot of fun, and I think this was my favorite photo from the set:

Whatever your stylistic preference, puddles are a powerful tool. They can present faux-symmetry or mind-boggling impossibilities to the viewer. Puddles can paint color across a dull backdrop, or clouds in the ground. Please, play with this idea and post your process and results. I'd like to see how other people approach this.

PS. Look for flash puddle photos on my flickr account soon...

Bumpr Stickr

2006-11-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

Do you stay up late nights, wearily pawing through photo after photo, peeking in peoples' profiles while they sleep and commenting on 5 gazillion pictures per night? Do you get the shakes when you have to go without a camera for more than a day or two? It's OK. You'll be alright. You're not alone.

Hi, my name is Fervus, and I'm a Flickr addict. I've been struggling with my addiction for almost a year now. It has caused me to spend all my money on photo equipment, even food and bill money when it gets bad. It makes me anxious on rainy days and itchy when I can't get my photo fix.

So to satisfy my own sick sense of humor, and for all you flickr addicts out there and those with "friends" who might be in denial, I made a sticker:

No doubt flickr users will chuckle and everybody else will scratch their heads.

Want to buy one? Here's the link.

3D Video Camera?

2006-11-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

Google's TechTalks is a wonderful collection of educational videos for geeky people like me (heck, my house says GEEKLAND on the front door.) A couple videos I found interesting at first glimpse were Stanford professors talking about climate change & relevent legal issues, and a look at security vulnerabilities in web software. Here's a quote from the introduction to one of the videos:

"Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts."

I was browsing this morning and found this video showing a test model for a live motion 3D video camera using a form of laser radar that they dubbed "Flash Ladar". At this point it's still in the "hand built by techies" stage, but the implications of this are wonderful. Automatic real-time 3D mapping of an environment just by pointing a camera around? Imagine moving a camera around an object for a 360-degree perspective of it, then generating a perfect 3d model of it based on the input from the camera? Amazing!

Then I plugged "3d camera" into google and found a preview of an Olympus prototype for a wooden camera apparently using a microscope lens and sporting a camera body created out of japanese evergreen wood using some form of 3-dimensional compression that makes it stronger than plastic? Not a 3d camera, per se, but nifty nonetheless.

The article is over at fareastgizmos.com (here's the link.)

D.I.Y. Holga Digital (with Macro!)

2006-11-18T02:27:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard of Holga cameras before. You might even have one. Here's mine:

Made in China, the Holga features a 60mm lens, takes pictures on medium format film and is made almost entirely of plastic. Plastic elements, housing, everything. There are a number of differing opinions regarding this camera on the internet, but I don't really want to debate the pros and cons of it in my blog. Instead, I want to saw one apart.

That's right, we're going to saw it apart.

My favorite part about this camera is that it only costs $17. There's even a link over to the right there that'll let you buy it (hint-hint). The low price of the Holga let me buy one to shoot film with (here's a link to my holga film flickr set) and one to throw at skunks when I get cornered walking around at night. Seriously though, I bought an extra Holga, with the intention of figuring out a way to mount the lens onto my Canon 350d.

I can hear somebody out there thinking: "Why would you defile the pristine beauty and integrity of your $600 camera with this horrible piece of plastic?" If you don't know the answer to that, you probably aren't reading this, and if you are reading this and you still don't know, this picture might clue you in. I took that pic before I had figured out the bellows part of this mod, and I was just holding the lens out from the body and trying to cover light leaks with my hand. But now you won't have to do that!

Mounting the holga lens on a digital body wasn't entirely my idea. Other people have done it before. I just wanted to figure out a slightly different way to go about it. I also had a lot of help from my roomate Naiden who is an industrial arts major. Seriously, I asked him "How are we going to do this?" and he handed me a very sharp saw.

This version of the holga lens mod probably a bit harder to make and use than the other models, but I like the way it aims the light better, it's less uniform and has no leaks.

To make this Holga 350d monstrosity, you will need:

a Holga camera (preferably an extra)
superglue (epoxy would probably work better, but I'm impatient)
a small amount of light-proof material (I used a black plastic sleeve from photo paper)
about a foot of memory wire
a body cap for your DSLR
some electrical tape

You will also need some tools. Aside from the obvious ones like scissors, you'll need a saw, a dremel with a grinding bit and a small file (with a rough side & a smooth side.)

I apologize in advance for not photo-documenting this as I did it. Next time, I promise.

To start, I wanted to keep the black plastic screw-on mount that the lens was made to be attached to. I unscrewed the lens mount from the body and took the screw out that stops the lens from turning all the way off the body. After taking the lens off, I put the rest back together, just because it was easier to hold this way while I sawed.

If you want instructions on how to take apart the holga, they're here at this wonderful site. Remember, even though the photo with the saw earlier showed the lens on the camera, I took it off before I did this, because I didn't want to hurt it.

Once we're finished sawing off the mounting ring for the lens, we're left with a camera that looks like this:

Yours probably won't already have the tape on it (at least I hope it doesn't.) I added that to temporarily cover the holes that this process left while I try to figure out a way to convert this camera into a medium format pinhole with a shutter.

Take the small plastic ring and file it down shorter so that it only has four (4) grooves on the outside. I don't think it matters which end you file, I had to figure out the height by trial and error after I'd already glued it, so I filed the outside (or the top side) off.

The next step is to take your body cap for your dslr and dremel out a hole about an inch in diameter right in the middle of it. Here is a picture of the hole in the back of my body cap, post-assembly:

Then superglue the plastic ring to the outside of the body cap.

Safety note: Superglue fogs things up. This means glass, lenses, mirrors, etc. Be sure to glue the plastic parts far away from your camera, and make sure to wait an appropriate amount of time before getting this lens anywhere near your camera. These pictures are neat but not worth ruining your DSLR to get.

OK, we're almost done! Clamp the bits with the glue down, or set something heavy on them, and we'll get back to them in a bit.

We're going to make the bellows now. Take your memory wire and clamp it or tie it somehow to a tube about 1/4" to 1/2" wide, and proceed to wrap it around the tube until it holds somewhat of a conical shape, like a funnel. We want the smallest end to be just big enough to wrap around the thing that sticks back out of the front part of the holga lens and the largest end of this wire cone to be just small enough to get down into the mounting circle of the lens.

Get where we're going with this yet?

Cut out a piece of your light-proof material that will wrap around the cone and wrap it around the cone, then tape it down, but not too heavily! If you use too much tape, the little bellows that we're creating will become too bulky and will not fit inside the contraption. I ran into this problem when making them first. You have to use just enough to keep it together.

Using electrical tape (you can use glue later once you get everything working), fix the bellows you've just made down into the ring you glued onto the body cap. It should look something like this:

The lens has little plastic pieces in it that keep the lens from screwing in past a certain point, and this can mess up your focus. It's pretty easy however to just snap these off with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I also used a heated paper clip to get as much of these things out as possible:

There's one final thing we need to change about this lens piece pictured above. The ring around the outside (with the grooves on the inside) is too deep. In order to be able to properly focus to infinity, I had to file down the sides of it. To get an idea of how much to take off, pry the little flat black plastic focus indicator piece off the outside of the lens and look at the groove it was sitting in. You want to pretty much exactly file until this groove is gone, and then even it out around the edges. The other option here is to very gently use the saw to take off that much of the plastic, but be careful not to hurt the rest of the lens, which sticks out further than our cut-off line.

At this point you'll have to tweak the memory wire a little and use tape judiciously, but the lens should fit into the top of the memory wire cone pretty easily, as pictured below, and should be snug enough to stay in on its own.

Now we have the finished unit:

I punched a hole in the lens cap to simulate vignetting. Experiment with different sizes and shutter speeds to get different effects. I found that exposing way below what my camera's meter thinks it needs gives me more of a gradient to the vignette, and often is a better exposure than the recommended one.

Be sure to clean this lens contraption out before you put it on your DSLR! I learned this the hard way, and I have dust on my CCD now. Which is not the end of the world, because the 350d has a CCD cleaning mode, which locks the shutter open so you can blow dust out of the sensor area.

And finally, here's the finished lens on my 350d!

Here's a link to my flickr set of pictures I've taken using this setup. Best of all, the entire thing collapses very small, so I can stick it in my pocket when I go out shooting as an alternative to my nicer, normal lens.

Because of the construction of the bellows, it is small enough to allow us to screw the lens onto the mounting ring with it folded up inside there, and focus the same way any other holga user does - we just have the added option of unscrewing it and using extreme macro mode. Note: I'm not sure about the focus length and depth required for any other cameras, as I only had a Canon 350d to test with. If anybody manages to successfully do the same thing for a Nikon or any other camera, let me know!

PS. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions, or if I failed to clarify something. It's almost 4AM as I'm writing this and caffiene only does so much for me.

D.I.Y. Ringlight Mention

2006-11-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

OK. This thing is nifty. The original D.I.Y. tutorial, is offline for the moment, so no link. But I can post some pictures of the one I made, and share a little bit about my experience.

Here is the uncut plywood with the ceramic sockets, unassembled, on my living room floor:

My roomate N is an industrial arts major. He likes to make stuff. So it was fairly easy to convince him to help me on this when I needed it. I measured, circled and cut per the instructions. N did the wiring, 'cause he's good with that kind of stuff, and showed me how to use a drill & saw to get rough circles in the plywood (actually I think he did most of the cutting, too...) so he gets kudos.

We decided to staple posterboard rectangles over the holes in the back to shield the dangerous wiring bits from prying hands and accidental finger entry.

This is my roomate stapling the last couple pieces on:

After the construction was done, I spraypainted it black with heat-proof paint and mounted it onto an old wooden tripod I had laying around. I still need to improve on the mounting a bit, which I'll get around to sooner or later, I'm sure.

It's been lurking in my basement ever since, occasionally helping me out with lighting things like motorcycles and portraits. Here is a picture of the finished version:

Expect a softbox mod & ball-mount tripod head mod with full documentation soon.

happy birthday to meeee...

2006-11-16T15:49:00.000-08:00

I will turn 25 on November 21st. In an extra show of ~~holiday~~ birthday cheer, I bought a present for myself in two parts. The first is a wireless flash trigger, which arrived 10 days early from Hong Kong. The second is a Nikon SB-28, scheduled to arrive via UPS in 5 days (and counting.)

Here's the trigger & reciever combo in the box on my dining room table:

Get used to this table, by the way, because until I've built a lighting box, it will be my default product background.

Here's the ebay auction picture of the SB-28:

I'll post my own pictures when I get the thing.

superhawk to the rescue!

2006-11-16T01:44:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about Honda's CB-77, aka the Superhawk, a beautiful motorcycle that was made from '61 to '68 (yet parts are still available!) There's one from 1965 in my basement. It's not mine yet, but very, very soon it will be.

I drool!

Seriously, like a kid before christmas, sneaking downstairs and rattling presents, I go down and sit on it, clean little bits of it, just kind of shaking the box, so to speak.

I cleaned it up a bit the other day. Here's a picture I took a few days before the cleaning:

...and after just a couple hours of TLC with a cleaner/degreaser (purchased from a marine supply store for ~$4) diluted in water in a spray bottle, and a toothbrush:

She's a sexy machine, no doubt about that, but I've also been doing some research; I need a new handlebar (the current one's bent), battery, hoses, air filters, oil change (& filters probably), sparkplugs, tires & tubes and I need to clean and re-gasket (rebuild) the carbs and petcock, and put a new clutch in her...

Wow.

What a list of repairs this bike needs. But for only $500, it's still a steal, And another $500 will probably get me on the road. Just thinking about it sitting down there waiting eagerly for my tools to embrace it's little metal bits makes me smile. A real big smile. I can't wait for the day that I can start taking it apart and deep-cleaning it, restoring it, making it a happy bike.

And this bike, in turn, will make me a happy Fervus.

PS. Her name is Havik (dutch for hawk.)

first blog post

2006-11-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

Hi. My name is Charles McNally, but my friends all call me Fervus. I'm a college student as well as a freelance web designer and photographer, living in Eureka, California.

I’m about to buy a ‘65 Honda Superhawk motorcycle, which I will restore and learn how to ride. This will be the subject of many blog posts. I just bought a Nikon SB-28. Anyone who is familiar with strobist will know exactly why I needed this off-camera flash.

These two items will change my life forever, for the better, and I will document that change here. Why? Why not?