Pixel Darkroom Photography

Monkey see, monkey do. Here are my two monkeys before going to bed.

Strobist info: 580 EX via on camera 580 EX II, CL bounced into corner wall. Small tweaks in Lr.

Today we went to Home Depot again, after a long time, to take part in the workshops for kids. We could have made a (rather useless) flag holder of some sort, that would have been thrown away in a few days, or could have made the rain gauge, which we decided to build, and which we will probably throw away in a few weeks after it gets all distorted from begin soaked in rain water.

A fun and useful project considering the weather here. The kids had to play with glue and pound on a few nails. They had a hard time with the nails and this reminded me of my first time I had to hit a nail. I must have been five or six. There was this shoe repair workshop on the corner of an intersection, back in Romania. I still remember it now, it was on my way home from school. We used to walk a lot. My mom took me to this shoe repair guy. She had to pick up some shoes from there and the man must have asked me if I have ever hit a nail. I don’t recall the whole visit, but I do remember he made me hit a nail and try to drive it in a piece of wood. It kept on bending. With a few hits, he did it easily. I kind of know what’s in my kids’ minds (especially my boy) when we have to hit the nails at the Home Depot workshops.

There are so many things that I see now with different eyes and I remember similar situations from when I was a kid. I’m sure this happens to everybody who has children, although I hardly hear people talk about it. I feel the transition from one generation to the other almost daily. It’s such an interesting feeling.

Tough day today. We got in a crash. I didn’t have much energy to shoot anything, so I just shot this. The bent part is on the driver’s door and fender. Everybody’s fine, just some metal bent and scratched and all the dealings that come with accidents.

Lighting info: (hardly any) available light, shot on a tripod.

Strobist info: 580 EX at 1/16 at 70mm CL via Pocket Wizard.

Strobist info: 580 EX II with coroplast snoot at 1/64 and 105mm CL. Shot via PW.

Today I wanted to shoot this little bird feeder in sunset light. But since the sun is always gone behind a building by the time it’s about to light this bird feeder, I thought I’d create my own sunset light. The way it works is like this: You set your camera to shoot on manual mode and underexpose the photograph so you can get a rich saturated sky. You do this by closing down the aperture (higher f-stop number) and/or increasing the shutter speed. I shot this somewhere around 1/160 of a second so it could still synchronize with my off camera flash via a radio trigger, called pocket wizard and at f8, or so. The flash had a gel (a colored plastic film on top, to make it orange looking, closer to the color of the setting sun). You have to play a little with the settings until you get the desired balance of light. There it is, day 144, bird feeder in the late afternoon home made sunset light. Read below for settings and check out the setup shot linked below for actual “view”.

Strobist info: 580 EX II at 1/1 105mm with full CTO via Pocket wizard, CR. Drop down the ambient to bring some color back in the sky. Setup shot.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

Lighter info: zippo lighter painting the star. It took more than 10 tries to get this right. OK, more than 20… a lot more. Bulb mode via Canon RC-1, f/20-22, ISO 100.

New life. Only a few hours old young.

Available light and 400 or 500 ISO, slow shutter, dark sodium vapor lights.

Can’t beat yesterday’s post so I’m not going to try to explain it. I am planning to shoot some still nature and this is one of the shots in this series.

Strobist info: 580 EX II handheld zoomed to 105m @ 128th power via ST-E2.

Today I decided to change the post titles. It was getting way to long to keep typing away those letters when I could just type in 3 numbers.

Here we had the chance to go to White Rock, BC. What you see in the distance is a peninsula of which the south side (left side in the photograph – I am facing West, obviously to those of you who know which way the Earth is turning) belongs to the USA. Look it up on the map. It’s weird. You can only access that part of the USA via water or on land only from Canada. Amazing place. I wonder how it is to have to cross the border on a daily basis, or get the boat out daily to go to your own country.

I shot a few more pictures there which I will add them to other sections of the website. Here goes Day 140 – White Rock, BC.

Little hands… big hands…

Strobist info: 580 EX II CR via on camera 580 EX II. Tweaks in Lightroom.

Ready for bedtime.

Strobist info: 580 EX II via Canon ST-E2 CR bounced into the corner wall on ETTL +/- EV + Lr tweaks.

The games are over and Canada scored big. What a great game today, what an effort on both sides. After having made my home in the USA for so long I must say that my heart was divided. Being part of (some of) the human nature to go against the flow, I wanted to grab the USA flag and ride around the city waving it but I don’t have comprehensive coverage on the vehicle and I didn’t want any trouble. I’m glad Canada broke a few records, including the one with winning the most gold medals. I just found out tonight that the next winter olympics are in Russia in 2014. I hope our dear neighbors are ready by then.
It’s great to see what the human body can do and what high goals can be reached in sports through austere training and hard work. Good games overall in Vancouver 2010, but after all,… they are only games.

Strobist info: 580 EX II CL with coroplast grid spot and 580 EX II with snoot via STE2. Setup shot.

Today was the last day of soccer and the kids got trophies and medals. My son had so much fun being in soccer and playing the games and I’m very glad he got to do this. He loves to run and the last day was great – three games and lots of scoring. Too bad it was so cold and it rained all day. I was thinking of shooting today’s shot in on the field or at the “ceremony” but we were out in the cold for too long.

Strobist info: 580 EX II x2 CL into collapsed umbrella and CR (with a gobo to keep it from flaring) via STE2. Small tweaks in Lr and Ps.

Strobist info: 580 EX II via ST-E2 hand held CL and CR.

There are so many things that have changed in your life time and my life time. I have seen technology change on so many levels and I am sure there are bigger changes yet to come. I have seen people come and people go, I have seen countries change, presidents change, dictators go (I am too young to have seen them come, but I’m sure there are some), I have seen regimes change.

One of the things that this cart reminds me of, is a similar cart my grandparents had in Iasi, Romania, where people had to buy propane by the tank to run their stoves. The rest of the house was heated with wood, but the cooking was done with propane. (I think it was propane; I know it was dangerous and we couldn’t play around those tanks). My grandfather had a hard time in his life. After having fought in WWII and living under Communism, life didn’t offer him many possibilities back in Romania. I remember to this day stories he told us about his combat experience, about growing up under an oppressive regime, about moving from the country to a city, stories about my parents.

One thing I remember was from back when he did not have a place to live. I don’t remember all the details, where my grandparents were living and how he came to accomplish this, but he told me he once saw a bird with a straw in its beak. He realized that she was going to build a home for herself and he said “I’m going to do the same.” So he started building a house. It was amazing to see old photographs of the house and the area in the times when it was built. There wasn’t even a road back there, only empty fields and dirt. When I grew up, there was on one side the Botanical Gardens which is basically an amazingly beautiful park and on the other side a full size soccer field for practice, where he had made a gate in the fence and my brothers and I could go and play soccer and run in the sprinklers or run with the dogs. The first house he built, was sort of temporary and was made of some special kind of home made bricks. They lived there for quite some time until they had finished the other house. This other house was the one where the cooking was now done using propane. What a big change from using wood in a stove. The propane came in tanks that were brought by a truck down the road, outside a small shack that served as a convenience store. Some people would line up there and wait for the truck to come. There was this sort of word of mouth announcement that the truck had come and the rest of the people could send someone (kids or grandkids) with a cart and some money to exchange the tanks. I don’t even remember how often this was. It might have been every two weeks, every week, I don’t know. I do remember that we used to carry each other in this two wheeled cart and run in the street with it. It was a fun toy. We fell a lot since it was not meant to carry people, but that didn’t stop us from playing with it. We didn’t have helmets and there wasn’t any big “warning!” sign on it to “keep away from children”.

Then at some point some neighbors had gas pipes installed and there was no more need for them to go exchange tanks. Technology was advancing.

The two girls I love most.

Strobist info: 580 EX II CL and CR via on camera 580 EX II. Another 580 EX II with snoot CL behind subjects as hair light.

World Wide Web portal.

This is how we feed the kids here. Boil a bunch of pasta and put it on the table. Everybody grabs as much as they can need and then we throw them in bed. Then, if they wake up early in the morning, (earlier than us that is, which they do) they get self serve leftover.

Strobist info: 580 EX II 24mm CR bounced into wall corner via PW.

Note: this post is on the same note as the UFO post some time ago. Take it with a grain of salt.