Taken in the American Museum of Natural History, in the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda. This one is a skeleton of an Allosaurus Dinosaur….

Research suggests that Allosaurs were ambush hunters, using its upper jaws like a hatchet. Allosaurus means ‘different lizard’… I can see what they mean – not the kind of lizard I’d fancy meeting.

Taken with a tilt shift lens (the TS-E 45mm Canon lens) to tighten the area of focus on the top set of teeth of the <cough> lizard.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/25 sec at f/2.8
ISO 400
45mm (Tilt shift)

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Stonehenge
Stonehenge (Sunrise)

MOO comes to the USA!

I’m a big fan of the MOO business cards – especially the ‘MiniCards’, in fact I did a previous post about the MOO MiniCards too…

So it’s good news to hear that they’ve just opened up a MOO US store. Located in Rhode Island, it sounds like good news for people wanting these little networking gems who live in the US (and a bunch of other countries benefit too by the looks of it).

1. Faster shipping (no more Royal Mail!)
2. Lower shipping costs
3. Ability to track the package

Every single time I’ve handed out one of their MiniCards to someone, they’ve commented about the card, and it’s been a conversation starter.

I usually upload hi-res files to my Flickr account, and make them private, and then import them into the MOO card making process straight from Flickr. I like the fact that I also have full control of the crop of the image in their card maker tool, and the zoom etc. Printing quality is excellent, and the size means you can keep double the amount of cards in any regular-size card holder!

Top Picture:

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/30 sec at f/2.8
ISO 200
70mm

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MOO Cards

Turn off the Lights!!

Bit of a random post today. As it’s Earth Hour coming up, I thought I’d try a mandatory light bulb shot….

Plain old light bulbs seem to get photographed all the time, so I hunted down a ‘different’ bulb with a view to shooting it on white. Needless to say the original idea soon morphed into something completely different!

This ‘Victorian’ style bulb (so says the packaging) seemed reasonably interesting – with the cone on top – which reminds me of the pieces of a board game I used to play… but can’t remember which one. It also had the multiple filament parts in a horizontal helter-skelter.

After boring myself with some truly awful shots of the bulb, I decided I needed a ‘background’ so pulled in the world map. Luckily I’m a bit of a world map addict, so happen to have a 6 foot by 4 foot one handy. Figured it either needed to be really large (to get the reflection wrapping round on the top of the bulb) or really close to the bulb.

After taking the whole setup down, I realised it would have been great to have a setup shot.

But the main components were the bulb on the kitchen table standing upright. A cardboard box with a black sheet over it made the ‘back’ ‘left’ and ‘right’ walls surrounding the bulb. Then the massive map was propped up between the wall and two light stands so that the map was effectively suspended above the bulb, facing down – to get the reflection.

Two Canon 580 EXIIs were then pointing at the map front and baffles were placed between the bulb and the flashes so that no direct light fell on the bulb itself. The camera (with 70-200 Canon lens and the Canon Extension tube 12 EF25 II) was then slotted through a small gap between the table and the bottom of the suspended map to get the photo.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Earth Hour is – it’s this Saturday (28th March) – and at 8.30pm local time, places around the world will switch off the lights for an hour. Like the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square or the Empire State building or the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower or the Burj Al Arab… but anyone and everyone is encouraged to switch off their lights. Check out the Earth Hour Website for more info…

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/800 sec at f/8.0
ISO 640
78mm

Strobist info: 2 x 580 EXIIs at 1/2 power pointing at the map from about 3 feet away.

Someone was asking me the other day where I got my business cards from. They’re from a UK company called ‘Moo‘. That’s a picture of two cards above, in Sprite. Don’t ask…

I love the cards – they’re different (half the height of ‘regular’ business cards) and they’re not too expensive either. You can have your own pictures printed onto them (e.g. direct from flickr), and you can print as many different pictures as you want in a set (the one in the above pic is this one). Head over to the Minicards section at the Moo website for more info on them. They also deliver to international destinations.

So now more about the photo. I didn’t want to just take a picture of the cards themselves, so decided to sacrifice two of them (it actually landed up being a few more… oops) and put them in a glass of Sprite. To keep them in place, the card edges were gently pushed into the curve of the glass to ‘wedge’ them in place with a chopstick and a fondue fork. Then wait for a while for suitable bubbles to form (I learned a lot about bubble-forming – like when you first put something in there, it’s covered in tiny bubbles, but to get the more interesting ones, wait a little bit and they’ll start joining up or floating which gives a better random pattern with different size bubbles. I digress…). Then brushed away the bubbles from around the fish’s eyes and took the photo.

Actually one other thing that I used properly for the first time was Live View. It was the first ‘real’ time that I’ve used it, and it worked perfectly. I wanted the eye of the fish to be perfectly in focus, so using live view, and zooming into the eye then using manual focus worked perfectly.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/8.0
ISO 200
50mm

Strobist info: Large umbrella directly above the glass, pointing down with a 580 EXII at 1/4 power. There was a second 580EXII at 1/32 power to the left of the glass and slightly above the height of the glass, which gave the the distorted ‘flame’ of light (if that’s what you’d call it) to the right of the glass.

The picture is pretty much straight out of the camera, with the exception of some cloning to get rid of my phone number on the card, and also adding the vignette.

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Moo Business Cards come to the USA!

Still pursuing my banjo ambitions, it’s now been roped into photo shoots in its spare time….

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/200 sec at f/20
ISO 400
70mm

Strobist Info:
- 580exII directly above the banjo shot through a partially collapsed umbrella (partially collapsed because I had to angle it staight down, and my light stand doesn’t do the beam-arm thing). 1/2 power.
- 580exII behind camera to the right with full CTO gel to warm up the wood on the right of the photo. Shot through a large diffuser. 1/2 power.
- Large white reflector below the camera, which un-clutters the reflection in the hand rest on the banjo (without this you see junk, books, tripod reflection and me-reflection).

Taken in Maine on a dreary day. We were outside taking pictures of the water and boats, before I saw the piles of fish heads on the floor. Slippery? Yes. Smelly? Yep. This bucket stood out because of the old leathery look.

Canon EOS-20D
2 sec at f/10
ISO 100
25mm