From the Silver City

Years ago on Mr. Wizard, he showed how to clean tarnished silver, using a very simple electro-chemical reaction. It requires little more than baking soda and aluminum foil. The other day I had a tarnished piece of silver and found that same method online. Apparently this method doesn't remove any of the silver—polishing does. Here are the before and after shots. I don't think this was originally highly polished, having more a of a smooth, matte finish. So I think it did a pretty good job, and it only took a few minutes.

Reflection

Ok, yes I'm a little less dedicated lately to the cause of a-photo-a-day. I haven't abandoned it altogether though.

In this photo I wanted to keep the horizontals and vertical as square as possible (almost got it). The best way to do this, with or without tilt/shift capabilities, is to keep the film (or sensor) plane of the camera parallel to whatever it is you want to photograph. The problem with this is, if you point the camera at a skyscraper, you have to fill up half the frame with the ground, in order to make the building look straight.

1/500th

This post is pretty technical, but I'll keep it short.
I did a little test a while back to see how my camera could wirelessly sync the flash, faster than the max sync speed—in my case 1/250th of a sec. Using PWs, 1/250th is safe. But 1/320th introduces a thin black line at the bottom of the (horizontal) frame. This should be fine, if you need that extra third of a stop. Increasing the shutter speed increased the black area. At 1/500th it was about half the frame, which makes sense, since it's twice as fast as 1/250th. 1/1000th leaves only a tiny light sliver at the top of the frame.

Creepy Lamp

My once bright and cheerful desk lamp has turned creepy and ominous—not to mention a bit dusty.

Duh! Moment: Umbrella Bracket

This should be of interest to Strobist readers. Some things are so obvious, you don't even think of them. This is pretty obvious to me—now, but I had to figure it out the hard way.

I had a "Duh!" moment a couple weeks ago when I figured out an alternate way of using umbrella brackets. Umbrella brackets are a good way to use flashes off camera, even if you're not using an umbrella. This little piece of equipment allows one to mount an umbrella and a small flash onto the top of a light stand. One end has a hotshoe mount for the flash, the other may have a brass stud, or it may just have an opening into which you can secure the light stand. Then you slide the shaft of the umbrella into the middle of the bracket (making sure the umbrella side points slightly upwards). In the middle of the bracket is a hinge with a rather large lever to tighten or loosen this hinge. The hinge allows one to adjust the angle of the flash so that it points into the center of the umbrella. In this configuration, you're stuck with the umbrella roughly horizontal, with a very slight angle upwards. But how often does anyone want to shoot with the umbrella horizontal? I usually prefer my light pointing at least slightly down onto the subject.

In order to be able to tilt the umbrella on the light stand, I screwed a ballhead onto the top of the light stand, and then screwed the umbrella bracket onto the ballhead. This worked the first time I did it, but not very well, and subsequent times I tried this method, it failed miserably. The ballhead is great, but it wasn't designed to take the kind of torsion this setup can generate. Just tap the umbrella and it becomes a giant lever, just dying to unscrew the bracket from the ballhead or the ballhead from the light stand. Then I realized, one need only switch the hotshoe mount to the other receptacle of the bracket, and you can easily tilt the umbrella! The flash might not line up perfectly, but at least you can tilt the umbrella. Alternately, the top of the umbrella bracket would be a much better place for a ballhead. Screw the hotshoe to the ballhead and screw the ball head to the brass stud. Then side the flash into the hotshoe mount and you can safely adjust the angle of the flash and the angle of the umbrella.

Hey Look! Another Photo of Me!

My lovely assistant snapped this striking photo. Quite an accomplishment, considering the subject matter ;-) I cropped it—little bit. The original composition was pretty good, but I wanted to show a little more detail.

Joe in Motion

Here's a pretty cool photo of me running. I'm just trying out a new toy I got. Thank you Laura! :-* It's called a Magic Arm (2929). It really is pretty magical. It's late and I'm sure I'll discuss it more in a later post, but for now I'll just leave you with this image. You can see the PW in my right hand that I used to trigger the camera. In some other shots I did a better job concealing it. I was quite literally taking this new gear out for a test run and I learned quite a bit about my gear and about my running.

La Gondola

Took a Gondola ride in RI on Thurs. It was fun. The boat was very luxurious, as you can see in this photo. It was a bit expensive, but way cheaper than going to Venice, and probably very nearly as good. Our gondolier even sang to us.