After yesterday’s post that ended with damaging my brand new softbox, I repaired it, added some clips to keep the flip-up top from flipping up, at least when I didn’t want it to, and glued some coarse grit sandpaper to the top of the hotshoe to prevent slippage (it’s an accessory shoe that takes the PC cord, so I’m not doing this to the 7D body.) Then I went out to do some
Tag: macro softbox
Macro photography, part 14: Selective pressures
The pursuit of the ideal softbox for flash macro photography has been going on for a while now, with many iterations, and now we have another. The last version took advantage of being able to hash out and 3D-print a design more optimized for the purpose, because I now could, but I realized after a
Suddenly, autumn
Not really, but last night the temperature dropped more than it had in weeks, coupled with high humidity, and dew formed with a vengeance, which we also hadn’t seen in weeks – it doesn’t often hit the dewpoint overnight in summer here. And so, there were a couple of subjects to be found because of this.
The Girlfriend and I had seen this eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica)
Just once, part 31
This week’s entry is slightly fudged, in that I had featured the species in a post a few months earlier, only I hadn’t identified it then I determine the choices for these posts by tags (in this case names) that have appeared just once, but technically,
A little content
I’ve been a bit busy of late, and haven’t been taking the time for posts – this will continue a little while longer, too. So I’m going to throw something down pretty quickly, the frozen pizza of the online world, because we need something here.
First of all, while this image isn’t the slightest bit impressive or even interesting, it’s evidence:
It’s
That’s a little better
Switched out the ‘clear’ diffuser for the white one on the new softbox, and the difference is noticeable – what we’re looking at here is the round light reflecting from the frog’s eye. Still not perfectly even, but probably the best I can hope for with this design (yes, I’ve actually considered a backwards-facing flash head into a parabola,
Just gonna duck right between ya here
It has been a week without posts, which I don’t even do when I’m traveling, always having a couple of even token posts appear to keep from announcing that the house is empty. Yet I’ve been here in Walkabout Studios and the environs the entire time, just wrapped up in projects, to say nothing of it being ridiculously hot out there and not only is it uncomfortable to be
Visibly different, part 4
The date of the above shot is unknown it’s a slide, and I know where it was shot but not when. For some reason this slide has no date stamp, though others, from what I believe was the same trip, do, so I’m going with that: August 2006. Down by a boathouse on Hyco Lake in northern NC, these guys were everywhere,
Projects, projects
First off, a brief but appropriate celebration.
Woo hoo! Hot damn! Who da man? I da man!
In short, I have just repaired one of my lenses, and it’s working perfectly. The lens in question isn’t one of the old manual ones that I fiddle with off and on, and have repaired many times past, but a complicated modern one: the Canon EF-S 17-85mm 4-5.6 IS USM. Those last bits mean
Macro photography part 12: Refinement
I have been meaning to do this for a while now, and have no real excuse for how long it took to get to it. It took no time at all once I sat down to work on it.
This is a combination of two projects, really. The first is the macro softbox, which is still in routine use because



















































