C i b o M a h t o . c o m

UPDATE: The Documentation Lighting event is canceled due to the impending inclement weather. Stay tuned, it will be rescheduled!

Want to present your projects online in the best light? Frustrated with the way your documentation photos come out? Need a warm place to be on a Friday night? Then you should definitely come out to Hack Pittsburgh this Friday for our Documentation Lighting workshop. Bonnie Bogovitch and I will cover the basics of documentation photography, using the equipment you already have. After we yammer on for a bit, we’ll get down to the business of taking photos, so be sure to bring your camera and something cool that you want to take a picture of. It’s guaranteed* to be a good time!

Documentation Lighting Workshop
Friday, Feb 5th, 2010, 7pm – 9pm
Hack Pittsburgh
1936 5th Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Cost: Freeeeeeeee

*There is no such guarantee, It turns out I’m a terrible liar!

We spent the greater part of the day building out a wall to section off the workshop area at Hack Pittsburgh. This is how it went!

Seriously, is anyone marketing tools like this?

I think they came out well, though obviously not all of them are actually for passport photos. I ended up using a single flash, camera left through an umbrella, with a metal reflector to the right of the camera. If anyone else wants one, let me know and we can set up a time.

From a recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook. Basically 2.5 cups white flour, 2 cups wheat flour, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 2tbsp oil, and some yeast. Come out to HackPGH tonight to try some

I’ve had a great time visiting wonderful people in California this past week. Thanks to Mars and Amelia for offering a place to stay, and to everyone who put up with me and my requests to see what they do . I am leaving fully re-inspired to do cool stuff, and look forward to the next time I can come out this way!

I’ve put up a set of my trip photos on Flickr.

Here you can see how I built a drill press, and consider the vacant spaces on the top of my head. It wasn’t very complicated, so the video is very short…

This was really just a quick test. I learned that I need to put the D700 in manual focus mode when using it’s time lapse function, and also that a period of 7 seconds is too slow to capture this sort of activity. I still fear for my shutter life when abusing the camera this way, so I will probably stick to my Powershot S3 and CHDK firmware for lengthly time lapse videos.