Photos of Phones and Phonographs (occasionally)
I think I overcooked the contrast/saturation on this one, but can’t really tell on this monitor. I really need to ditch it and get something new which is worth calibrating. Anyone want a pair of 10 year old 17″ Dell CRT monitors?
I wasn’t sure the crocus was blue enough for this weeks theme, so I took a photo of some bin bags, just to keep the theme week going!
I have no idea what the question was.
I’ve decided that I’m not making nearly enough effort with Stus Tuesday Challenges, and now that I’m not doing photo-a-day I’m getting lazy and sloppy with my camera. So rather than one half-hearted attempt from me this week, I’m going to try and take a photo a day that fits the theme – and then Stu can have the best of the bunch.
The theme is “Blue” which strikes a chord for me this week. I’ll not go into details though, this isn’t LiveJournal.
I’d forgotten about Stu’s Tuesday Challenge until today, so went out at lunchtime to hang around the docks to see what I could find. The idea being to take just one shot, and make it count. Well, here it is. The focusing isn’t as tight as I would like, but it was the only shot I took, so it counts.
We had some snow this week, not a huge amount of snow (about 5 inches – stop laughing Jani!) – but enough to right royally stuff up the public transport in Bristol. Anyone would think the UK wasn’t used to snow!
My car was snowed in, and shoveling it out seemed like far too much work entirely, so Thursday/Friday I walked to work. It’s only about 6 miles, and walking in the snow is more interesting than sitting in a cold house being distracted by the cat while trying to work from home. Plus I have this pesky “it’s better to be in work late than to work from home because travel looks difficult” thing – besides, my colleagues who work in Bath made it in, and that’s a lot further away than me – can’t let the side down!
My walk in is quite pretty in the snow, so I did take a handful of photos. They’re mostly pretty uninteresting. The overcast sky coupled with everything being covered in white means there’s very little directional light about, no directional light means no shadows, and everything looks flat and boring.
There were a couple of pretty happy snowmen about though…
I’ve spent the evening modifying disposable camera flash circuits (including doing things which are probably unwise, like moving the capacitors), wrapping them in gaffa tape and taping them to the inside of a cake tin.
I’ve already decided that there’s too much that could nibble your fingers in this project, so I won’t do a full writeup, instead I’ll stick to posting the schematics/stripboard layout for the opt-isolated trigger gubbins which means that this beast is safe to use with a DSLR.
Still todo:
The picture above is the first test firing of the circuit, triggered by my Nik0n D80. It didn’t die, and neither did I. I count that as a success.