#145 A Makeshift Studio

A few days ago, I started to dabble in making a makeshift light box to take pictures in of small objects. To do this I used the tutorial I found or was forwarded to a while ago (I’ll post link later when I’m back on my iMac). The result was relatively good if a bit small. All of the paper I had, no matter which sketchbook I tore pages out of to get paper to make it, none of which was sturdy enough to make it stand on its own, reinforcing it with cardboard strips did help but I was then left with the problem of it being really wonky and hardly big enough to fit anything decent inside to take photographs of. Another additional problem was that I couldn’t get my camera in at a decent angle for some things I was wanting to take a photo of.

This image below is what I ended up with and just look at how shoddy it looks:

That was Saturday. Last night I gave the whole lightbox/mini studio thing another shot and I took a different approach. I was thinking bigger this time. Remembering I had a sketchbook of A2 layout paper I started taking a few pages out of it and got to work. I took some blu-tac and put some on the sides of the paper and put it 20cm above the surface of my desk, letting the rest of the paper drape down and onto the desk. This left a short portion of white on the desk which would have been obvious on the photos, so I overlapped another piece of layout paper onto the one I had already positioned. Excellent. This sorted out the background for the photos, but the next bridge to cross was lighting.

With the first iteration of the light box I made, the built in roof helped with the diffusing of the light, avoiding the obvious reflections and the horrible direct light the desk lamp would have given. This version did not have a ‘roof’ so I had to improvise some what. I remembered something I had read somewhere on the internet, of someone at a motorshow and they had their DSLR with them. They wanted to avoid harsh highlights and shadows gotten from the use of the flash so they taped a piece of tracing paper or something close to tracing paper onto the flash of the camera which apparently helped them out massively with producing better shots. So what I did was I cut down a piece of layout paper (since I didn’t have my smaller layout pad to hand) and some more blu-tac and loosely wrapped the paper around the shade of the desk lamp (doable because it was an anglepoise style lamp) and attached using the blu-tac. Wrapping it round loosely meant air could get in and circulate so the paper would not get so hot which could cause a fire. That was something that was mentioned by the photographer talked about above at the motorshow who said that after constant use of the paper on the flash, a burning smell occurred which meant he had to stop and change paper every so often.

The final change I made was to change the light bulb in my lamp. The one that I use in it has a warm white light. Very yellow. The one I changed it to in order to take the pictures, and the one I got with the lamp when I bought it was a very white light, quite cold and clinical. It was, going by the white balance preset in Aperture 3 afterwards, quite close to daylight in a way.

And that was that. I could angle the light where I wanted it, and switching between my 50mm prime and my 18-55mm lenses I was able to produce some quite good photographs of model cars, my new Mr Jones Watch and a few other things. I spent roughly 3 hours taking photos last night which I was quite happy to do as I hadn’t taken so many for quite a while.

Here is the updated light box/studio

The changes for next time? I think next time I am going to make a few more changes to this. The first one is that I am probably going to buy a large A0(ish) piece of paper to use. The larger space would be useful for taking larger objects, or being more adventurous with smaller ones. I was limited a few times when taking some pictures that I ended up seeing the edge of the paper. Use a tripod. I spent most of the time resting the camera on the desk and taking pictures that way. It became a bit of a problem when trying to take shots from above, especially when the shutter speed was quite low for some of the pictures. Make a better or bigger light diffuser to cover the light and possibly position it a little further away from the bulb itself. There was a number of times when I saw the light reflection and I know it could have been done a bit better. The final one is probably the use of some helping hands, either the small crocodile clip style or just getting someone in to give me a hand, but trying to hold up a piece of kappa board as a reflector, adjust the light and hold on to the camera at the same time did get a bit tricky at times, which did end up with some blurry images.

Apart from that, it ended up quite well. Over 300 photos were taken, that being an average of about 100 an hour for those of you who didn’t want to work that one out. And the quality was astonishingly good for something made in under five minutes. Some of the photos of model cars looked just as realistic as full size car images.

Here are some examples of the photographs taken using the makeshift studio:

#144 Don’t Know What I Was Trying To Achieve…

In the same theme as the last post, I have been doing something relating to F1 and Red Bull Racing. But if I’m honest, I think the last one is great compared to this… I don’t quite know what I was trying to achieve this this one. Anyways…

#143 Drawn Whilst Trying not to Yawn

There was a point during the F1 this morning where I got a bit fed up of watching what was meant to be a good race but ended up being a bit of a slog thanks to the artificially enhancing or attempting to artificially enhance races with the tyres that won’t last long etc, so I opened up illustrator and photoshop and got to work with this. A quick image of Sebastian Vettel in testing. I wasn’t being too picky with it and if I’m honest it doesn’t look too good, but I did finish it just as they were crossing the finish line.

#38 Google it.

Before you start to read this, I’m going to give a word of warning that due to the mood in which I am in whilst writing this today (21st February 2010), I do ramble on quite a bit, so if you want to skip to the end, you can just take a look at the pictures and just be done with it.

Over the past couple of years there has been something which has become ever so annoying and what is worse, they don’t seem to know that they are doing this. If you haven’t already guessed who or what I am talking about, then I’m guessing you didn’t read the title of this post. Google are the culprit, Google are the problem, and knowing Google, they think they are the solution. From where I am standing they are slowly trying to take over the world, through the dreaded act of diversifying. I wrote a post about this and how I thought companies were going down the wrong path with this way back in August. In fact it was my second post on here, and guess what. My opinion still has not changed.

Google obviously started off as a search engine, and its popularity just began to grow. They bought YouTube. A good move in the long term but at the time it did mean that they wouldn’t really be continuing with Google Video which at the time, my friends and I would prefer it to their new acquisition. Every so often, a trip into the Google Labs would be in order just to see what sort of things they were working on. To view the trending searches of the day etc, just to see what was going on. It appealed to the geek side of me.

Another step in the right direction was Google Earth, pretty much a standalone extension of Google Maps. I was an early adopter of this, or at least I think I was, and it was great, and it still is, despite being a bit of a resource hog on my computer. There are times where I am unable to resist loading it up just to have a shot in the flight simulator in it.

This is the level of diversification which I would say I was comfortable with. They were a search engine company, who had a range of other products or services which also allowed users to search for what they wanted, whether it be places, or videos.

In recent years it does seem as though Google are trying to take over the world, very much in the same vein as what Microsoft doing. But whereas Microsoft buys out businesses and makes itself grow even larger. Google gives the impression that they will have a shot at it and if it works it works and if it doesn’t then well, at least they tried. Whilst I do admire them for doing this, I don’t think that it is the right thing to do. We all need competition and it just seems that Google are trying to eliminate them all.

They launched Google Wave. Supposedly it was supposed to reinvent the way in which we use email. After the initial surge of interest and usage, it has fallen by the side of the popularity trail. I will go on and check it every so often, as I was lucky enough to have been given an invite by a friend, but the conversations had with people have just dried up. It does work quite well, but as it is still in Beta, or even Alpha form, there are still quite a few bugs in it. My MacBook can barely run it, and my iMac will frequently beachball when I use it. The longer waves have load times worthy of being given their own birthday. I’ll use it if they improve it, but at the current moment in time, there hasn’t been any sort of improvement or modifications since mid December, which was when I joined it.

One of the most recent ventures by Google is Buzz. Where they are trying to take on the likes of Twitter, Facebook and all the other sort of main stream social networking sites by providing something which just doesn’t make sense. I seem to have signed up to it by accident. It appears in my sidebar when I log onto Googlemail. I’ve not really had a look at it, but from what I’ve heard it has been a MASSIVE fail. There has been complaints about it and regarding privacy issues, it has also led to an investigation into it (well from what I can remember anyways). It definitely didn’t appear in Twitter’s trending topics for very long compared to Wave, and I don’t actually know anyone who uses it.

One of the only non search/mapping/email things I will use google for (apart from video since that technically is YouTube), is iGoogle. But even then, not very often. It isn’t my homepage, that currently is the Apple UK homepage. I don’t use it to check the weather as I have perfectly good (well, mediocre) widgets for that. Emails? Nope, I use the Mail application. So what do I use it for? The only thing I use iGoogle for is Google Reader, so I can quickly see if there have been any updates on any RSS feeds I follow. This probably isn’t what Google want me to do, but I have other things which are much better at doing what I need to do.

Whilst I am on a roll, I suppose I will have to mention the Google phone and operating system. The Nexus One is their answer to the iPhone, and it has already developed its own following. The operating system, pretty much a desktop version of their mobile operating system, Android, is planned to be a ‘cloud’ based operating system, where the users information isn’t stored directly onto the computer in which they are using, but instead on a server many miles away. Whilst this has its advantages in some areas such as users of multiple computers, it does have quite a few drawbacks. From what I can fathom out, or can be bothered to fathom out, you need to be able to connect to the internet in order to access all of your files, or most of them anyway, which is fine if you are a tech-addict who doesn’t leave their home, or areas which have internet access, but for others this isn’t really the way forward. However, I have just remembered that I am sure I read somewhere that this operating system was aimed more specifically at netbooks rather than desktops or laptops. Netbooks because they aren’t generally used at the users primary computer, it is usually their secondary, or third computer.

I am not saying that I hate Google. I use them as my primary searching facility, and email… and maps. But the thing I don’t like is the fact that they are trying to do a Microsoft and take over the world, as it were. In doing so they are slowly destroying the links they have made in the past few years. Because of the Nexus One, they have already lost a key position on the board of Apple. Why not just stay a search company, but keeping the most popular additions they have (some, not all)? Become even better at what they do instead of coming up with other services which have an impact, but don’t have the momentum to keep going. I don’t know why, even after this post which is closing in on the 1300 word mark. I guess the mood that I am in has dictated the way in which I have been able to decipher the information and just vented it out as a rant. I’m not complaining. But I am starting to query how much this has to do with design. Ah well.

#37 Deferring Vol. III: Some Viewing Material

Before I start, I would like to point out that for post #37 I was originally going to write a post about our Design Studies project. Whilst it has been written and has been for a week or so, I decided not to post it yet since I just didn’t think it was any good. And also before I continue, this post was going to be called ‘Too lazy to write Vol.I’ for the reason that I couldn’t think of anything else to write.

As the title of this post suggests, I’m relatively too lazy to write something for this post so I’ll just post some videos which I found and thought were a good way to pass the time. The finding of these videos really is the result of procrastination, and what can I say in my defence? Ehm… nothing.

First video onto the chopping block is one which deserves to be watched in 1080p, well shot, and appeals (or a-peel, if you may) to the geekier side of me. I would like to do something like that, along with actually making a Reubens tube, but more on that another time.

Next up is one which I have known about for a while, well, since it was uploaded to YouTube. Just shows what can be done if you have enough determination. I really like this video.

This is something which I also quite like, in execution not really the product in this video. Videos which show how things are made from start to beginning. I have a video in a similar sort of vein to this from a few years ago showing the new new MINI. In this case it is Google’s Nexus One smart phone. Links to the other parts of the Nexus One videos are posted after the video.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Finally, I leave you with a video of something quite truly fantastic. Nothing I have watched has ever come close to the sheer brilliance of this video (this weekend anyway). Liquid Nitrogen and laptops go very well together.