Poof

Owl statue

Daffodil Party

Did somebody say magnification?

Earlier comment some of you may or may not have read by me:

BLAH BLAH BLAH close focus NERD BLAH 1.67 to 1.

This got me thinking — if I reverse my 24mm and put it in front of my 1.4x teleconverter, what kind of magnification would I get? Theoretically, the 24 should give me greater magnification than my 28, right? Take the center part of that image, spread it out a bit, and we get something ginormous:



That's the E string on my guitar. It's a 46 gauge, which means, after a bit of multiplication, I achieve a 2.56:1 magnification ratio with that setup. Dial set to 22, flash set to 1/16 output. What's scary is that I could get a bit better than that, even, if I left the filter attached to the threads between the camera body and the reversing ring.

By the way, unless you like feeling really inadequate in your dusting skills, don't take pictures at that depth of field setting with that sort of magnification. It's just depressing.

Update: I finished testing. Using this basic math process:
28 by itself
3008 pixel image width, 268 pixel string width
8.9 percent image width
23.5mm sensor width, 2.09mm width on sensor
reproduction ratio:
2.09/1.17 = ~1.78:1
I have taken pictures of the known quantity, the low E string on my guitar, with all possible lens combinations (except the reversed 24 by itself, which I forgot until just now; that one, I have interpolated, because the 1.4 multiplier holds for the other two lenses). Data? Grandmother!

reversed 24+1.4x... 2.56:1
reversed 24........ 1.82:1
reversed 28+1.4x... 2.50:1
reversed 28........ 1.78:1
reversed 50+1.4x... 0.71:1
reversed 50........ 0.50:1


Neat!

Here's something else I picked up with the 24:

Oregano leaves!

Here's the leftovers.

Isolationism

I'm proving a point

Sad tree

I already know you two don't like the fisheye.

Annual Tradition

I get to entertain myself a lot. Today, I wanted to go walk around the tidal basin and do whatever it is I would have done down there, but sadly, the blue/orange lines were running with a heavy delay and it didn't mean so much to me that I wanted to walk over a mile and a half to get there.

So, I picked up something I did last year. The day after St. Patrick's Day, I was at Murphy's of DC. I remember that because they still had french fries instead of cottage fries. Seemed like a good thing to continue doing.



Best meal of all time, right there - Irish stew and "Mooney's Irish stout" at the bar.

Edit: I pulled the metro picture as a threeaweek because A) it sucked and B) I took a better picture.

Abandonment.

project

One of the things I'm doing with my idle clock cycles today is figuring out whether or not I can convince jalbum to ignore embedded ICC profiles on jpeg images I touched with photoshop, and then condensing all of my camera output into a centralized album by the end of the day.

The album would be 1702 images.

Point of interest: Rendering the album on a 3.2 GHz quad core Mac Pro took 19 minutes 12 seconds. Rendering a 1000 image gallery took 22 minutes on a dual core 2.4 GHz conroe system.

Also, oh goodness is the IO performance on that machine ever fast.

I want one.

Rainstorm

Eventually, this happened in photoshop:

I win at Oregon Trail

Here's a funny memorial:

Straw

Levels corrected and higher quality of the last picture in the below gallery.

Hey, look what we got

We had a 46" LCD TV installed. For whatever reason, it's been approved for basketball use.

There you go.

Happy post 400.

Dinner

If you've never had my chicken chili, here's what you're missing:






mmm... pile of meat.

Banjo

If you go to Virginia, you too can pay 50 cents for ... well, one of the most horrible things I've ever seen come out of a little plastic egg.

Workplace tour

I decided to take pictures of work today. I'm not sure why. There's a photo tour here.

Something

I was practicing earlier, and switched basses from my Corvette FNA Jazzman to my discount Rockbass Fortress 5. The fortress is so much louder than the corvette that I had to wonder why it was so low. A lot of active preamps for basses have output trim pots, so I went in looking for one. That's what I found - no trim pot, so no volume adjustment.

Instead I took a picture Josh's way - Aperture 11, exposure 2 seconds, flash about 8 inches off to the left set to 1/32 output, 24mm coverage.

Monument

I thought this was a really impressive monument.

Eventually, we heard a Huey warming up in the not-so-distant distance, and I just sort of checked out, staring at the area around me.

Bowing out

See, this one, it deformed there before it popped. Also, there's a big crack around the back.