Dailies

These images are ones shot to post in the daily community on smugmug. I've been participating in this community for about six years. For the first few years, I tried to always post a shot taken either that day or the day before. Now, although I try to shoot everyday, I don't necessarily post the images on the same day they are shot.

Welding - yesterday I had a chance to capture a welder at work.<br />
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Thank you all for your kind response to my hot air balloon kaleidoscope. What a dummy I was to ask people to guess what it was and then put the answer in the keywords. Oh, well, live and learn.<br />
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Christmas certainly seems to bring out smugmuggers' creativity...so many terrific images. Many of you seem to find it quite easy to take wonderful shots of Christmas ornaments, but I confess I find it rather difficult. But, I'll keep at it and eventually I may get a worthy shot. Only ten days until Christmas! And so much left to do! I'm sure many of you are feeling the same way. Well, I hope you make progress on all your tasks today!

1201 / 1959

Welding - yesterday I had a chance to capture a welder at work.

Thank you all for your kind response to my hot air balloon kaleidoscope. What a dummy I was to ask people to guess what it was and then put the answer in the keywords. Oh, well, live and learn.

Christmas certainly seems to bring out smugmuggers' creativity...so many terrific images. Many of you seem to find it quite easy to take wonderful shots of Christmas ornaments, but I confess I find it rather difficult. But, I'll keep at it and eventually I may get a worthy shot. Only ten days until Christmas! And so much left to do! I'm sure many of you are feeling the same way. Well, I hope you make progress on all your tasks today!

$Shot some weeks ago, I was trying to get specific refractions (thanks to John and Angela Larkin for the correction from reflections) to show up in the water drops. Best viewed in the largest sizes. This one was a failure in that sense but I rather liked it, nonetheless. This exercise was probably the most difficult thing I've attempted. The distance of whatever you want to reflect from the water drops has to be just perfect. I was going through all sorts of things to try to adjust the distance. Then, the camera must be directly over the drops on a tripod or some sort of support and perfectly level. After working at it for a couple of hours, I thought my back would never be the same. However, I'm definitely going to try again. A couple of other shots from the same session are here: <a href="http://fotoeffects.smugmug.com/Other/Odds-and-Ends/7032233_9SbQx#1114893227_giKSw">http://fotoeffects.smugmug.com/Other/Odds-and-Ends/7032233_9SbQx#1114893227_giKSw</a><br /> <br /> I see some of you are asking about my setup on this. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures of the various setups I used, but, basically, these are the things I tried. First, I quickly learned that the size of whatever you are trying to get to show up as a refraction in the water drops is very important. The other key factor is the distance from the water drops to the object to be refracted. You need a glass plate of some sort. I used a piece of glass from a picture frame. Then you coat the glass with a little bit of Rain-X. Just put a few drops on Rain-X on the glass and then polish with a dry paper towel. This causes the water drops to bead up very nicely on the glass plate. You can use several methods to put water drops on the plate. I used an eye dropper, but you can also spray water from a water bottle. I found that smaller water drops actually work better than large ones. This was counter-intuitive for me, at least, and, at first, I was trying to get bigger water drops. Then, you have to have a way to place the glass plate some distance above whatever you want to be refracted. I tried a number of different things for the refraction object: a quilt; cutouts of quilt squares from a book, etc. As I said, the size and distance are the critical things and you just have to experiment. To get perfect refractions in every single drop, you have to have your camera completely level. You need something that will hold your camera directly over the water drops, perfectly still and level. I tried a number of interations of my tripod and none worked too well. If you extend an arm of the tripod out over whatever you are photographing, the camera tends to make it too heavy and will tip over. If you use the tripod in the position where the camera is hung below the plate, the legs probably won't spread far enough apart to straddle the refraction object completely, or, if they do, then they may not allow you to raise or lower the camera to the level you require. It is also hard to look through the viewfinder when using this setup. The ideal thing, which I do not have, would be a special arm with a tripod kind of base. The base needs to be weighted to counterbalance the weight of the camera extended out on the arm. Then you have to maneuver the camera into a position above the water drops where you can see a perfect reflection, while keeping the camera perfectly level. I am a very short person and I found it very difficult for me to get my head far enough over the plate to actually see through my viewfinder. That is why my back hurt so much at the end of this exercise. You also really need to have a way to raise and lower the plate. I did not have anything like this and tried a bunch of things, such as stacks of books to hold up the plate, two stereo speakers to hold two edges of the plate, an upside down stool or chair with the plate placed on the legs, which were sticking up. None of these worked really well. I'm guessing that the people who do this sort of thing really well may have built a special apparatus to hold the camera, as well as the plate. Of course, you could also have something you could crank up and down that would hold the object to be refracted in the drops. I can now definitely see how someone can get the perfect refractions, but the implementation is pretty complicated. If anyone out there knows a simpler way to do this, please let us all know. I had seen some tutorials about how to do this, but they all left out these nitty gritty details. Still, it is a fun and challenging exercise and I urge you to try it out. Be sure to allow yourself several hours at least. I could easily have spent all day on it if I had not gotten so exhausted trying to keep the camera steady, level, focused, etc. If I do this again, I'll try to remember to take a photo of the setup for you all.<br /> <br /> Thanks very much for the enthusiastic response to my shot of the hoarfrost on the bird feeder. Hope your week is going well. I can see how focus stacking would work on this, too, but you would have to be very careful to keep track of every area you had focused on. Also, it seems to me that you would, of necessity, have to move the camera a bit when you changed the focus to a different section and that would complicate the effort. At least, I think that would be the case. Perhaps someone who has done focus stacking on something similar could explain very precisely the process of taking all the different images, while still keeping them lined up so you could use the focus stacking software. I actually have some of the software but have not had a good subject, as yet, to try it out on. I was thinking a spider web with water drops.$

Rated:
BIRDS-WILDLIFE-AUSTRALIA
on Aug 26
Fine composition and superbly exposed ! Fascinating shot !
ava laurie
on Jul 14
I have always found welding to be very interesting. They is something cool about going to work and star welding giant indestructible pieces together. I would love to internship at a welding factory to see how it is to work in it everyday,
Rated:
Hershy
on Dec 31
Great shot - the colours look perfectly natural! Nice PP!
Thanks for the info on kaleidoscope effects!
Rated:
Tim Voss
on Dec 20
I like this. A lot. Excellent bit of work!
Rated:
Ethan Winning
on Dec 19
I love this shot! I'm not much on humans, but work fascinates me. You skulking around fascinates me.
Rated:
Chuck Beehner
on Dec 18
Nice even lighting, even the light of the weld arc is perfect.
Rated:
WildeLifePhotography
on Dec 18
Great welding shot. Don't you wish that you could always carry your camera with you at work when walking through the shop.
Rated:
Howard's Photography
on Dec 17
Great capture, I like that welders' arc/smoke!
Rated:
Andrea Kaus (ChaosGraphics)
on Dec 17
Super shot!
Rated:
paulbellinger
on Dec 17
Looks like a nice shop! Great shot!

Dailies

BIRDS-WILDLIFE-AUSTRALIA

ava laurie

Hershy

Tim Voss

Ethan Winning

Chuck Beehner

WildeLifePhotography

Howard's Photography

Andrea Kaus (ChaosGraphics)

paulbellinger