Fixed

After 18 months of sitting on my wall as an ornament, I finally found the part I needed (on ebay) to repair my Rebel XT that got salt water on it in Australia. And now, it's running at 100%! This is the 4th time I've resurrected some piece of technology that was completely dead.

And now my Rebel XT is taking pictures like nobody's business. I just need to figure out what to do with it now that it's fixed.

The Neighbourhood Lights

Just a few pictures from my neighbourhood. Some nice lights!

Also, there is a little something extra going on here in these pictures. I had to use a long exposure to capture all that light when it's so dark out. Most of the time it was about 30 seconds that the shutter was open....so I took my giant MI flashlight and painted some light on parts of the photos to add a bit of light where I wanted to. It's a cool technique. I want to play around with it some more over the holidays.

Night Sky

For anyone who has been downtown after 4pm, you've probably seen the crane lit up over where they are building the new Duchess Park school. Good on WIC for making the effort and putting lights up on that HUGE crane. This is a picture out my bedroom window that I took one evening.

Sparkle

I like this picture of my tree. I've got it all setup and have loaded it up with $35 worth of decorations from the dollar store. Everything is so sharp and sparkly. I'm thinking that I'll look for some good opportunities to take some Christmas light shots over the next little while. I went out last night to take some shots of my neighbours house and a few houses the next street over. They turned out pretty good. I think I'll post a few of them pretty soon too. I tried a bit of a new technique when taking the pictures, but I'll wait to describe what I did in the post with those pictures.

Shine

I like this little picture of one of the ornaments on my tree.

Christmas Pictures

I've decided to take a few Christmas themed pictures over the next few weeks. I just recently got my tree up and decorated, so I took a bit of time one evening taking pictures of it with my fireplace roaring and a hot cup of tea. Here is the beginning....I hope to post a couple per week starting in December.

New Camera Toys

Well, for a while now I've been reading a blog about photography and lighting. The main doctrine from the blog is that you pretty much never want to have your flash on your camera. You almost always want the light that you are taking pictures with to come from off camera. So, to do this you need a few things to make this work. And then after you get your flash firing off camera, there are a whole lot of things that you can do with the light to make it better. Way more than you ever thought was possible.

First, the blog I've been reading is Strobist.

The wireless gear you need to get your flash to fire at the exact right moment is very diverse. But basically there are three main options out there for wireless:

1. Cheap wireless triggers from Ebay: cheap=unreliable and short distance.
2. Expensive wireless triggers from Pocket Wizard: hardcore, rugged, bulletproof, and very expensive.
3. Somewhat expensive RadioPoppers: a bit cumbersome to attach to your camera and flash, able to transmit camera information to the flash (ie how powerful the flash should be for the picture).

There are more options out there, and there are more products that will be coming to the market soon that will change some of this.

So, as you would expect, I ordered the cheap Ebay triggers and have had them for a while. Since I'm not making any money with photography, that's pretty much what I'm stuck with for now.

But I also wanted to have multiple light sources in my pictures to add some cool effects and fill in shadows from multiple angles. So I purchased a couple more used flashes on Ebay for $75 and $129. Cheap considering what a full price flash costs.

After a while of reading Strobist, a link comes up on his site for a seminar DVD that he has produced: 8 DVD's of footage with 4 of them being the seminar and 3 of them being example location shoots for different situations. Very cool. The first DVD, however, was a separate shooting where he explains all the gear he uses. The lighting gear isn't very expensive piece by piece, except when you add it all together. $25 here, $30 there....and you're up to $400 pretty quick. That's an extra car payment for me.

Anyways, I don't really have anyone to be accountable to for spending my money, so I ordered the stuff cause it's cool and it will be fun.

I haven't been able to spend much time using it all over the past week or so, but Tyler and I played around and got a few fun shots:

Bailey is good a posing. This is shooting a flash through an umbrella on a stand to the right.

You can see the edge of the umbrella here. It makes for a nice big light source which makes the light on Bailey nice and soft.


Here's a bit of the setup. Tyler is getting ready to take a picture, but I shot this picture first. The flash really lights up that umbrella!

Tyler trying to figure out how his con-founded Nikon camera works.