Marbled

 Marbles are a fascinating subject. They work very well to both reflect the objects/colours around them and refract the light sources they are being lit with. One can light a whole cup of marbles with just a few light sources. They are a very even balance of smooth clear glass, and also tiny, unique imperfections and chips. At first glance they all look the exact same, but upon close inspection, the tiny bubbles in the glass, bends, misshapes, and nicks out of the surface make every marble unique. So they other day, upon realizing the ridiculous number of marbles my house in infested with, I thought they might make some good practice for some still life studio practice.
Ingredients:
-Canon Rebel T1i
-35-80mm Lens
-Manfrotto Tripod
-One clear wine glass
-One clear glass dish-type thing (Candy-dish maybe?)
-Probably 3/4 dozen marbles (half clear, half "Cat-eye", one blue)
-Two desk lamps
-Some backgrounds for colour and a counter top for the marble-y space like refractions.
Instructions:
Set up and shoot for as long as you want, try every option you can think of. If you can, shoot in RAW and play with the photos to your hearts content later.
Archipelago Photography- insulae de cogitum lumenque, maritus cum nomen

Portraiture

Is This Still Under Warranty?

 I have a confession; I have a bit of a destructive streak. This is my old iPod. I bought it a few years ago and about 4 days after the warranty ended it shut itself off entirely. No amount of fiddling or convincing could make it work again. So it's been sitting in it's case in my room for about a year. At my cottage in Grand Bend, we have a little air pistol that shoots small metal BB's. It is honestly one of the coolest little devices I've ever played with. My Grandfather was a great gunman, and my mom was actually Ontario's best Woman's pistol shot for a few years. So naturally I'm a damn good shot. We've been shooting cans and plastic bottles for a few months but my little sister and I had this idea; push my shutter speed to it's limits and see how cool shots we can get. So here was the plan: Set up outside with the iPod on the edge of our deck. Camera (tripod mounted of course) reasonably close shooting ISO 800-1600, aperture wide open and pushing the speed as fast as we could with the available light(topping out at about 1/1500). With 9 frames per second bursts we usually ended up counting down then opening the shutter and firing off about 4-5 exposures for every shot of the air pistol. 9 fps sounds fast but we usually ended up with about 1 shot before it hit, about 3 after and hopefully 1 good "contact" shot. The first contact shot hit really low and flipped it upside down (we actually got the BB in the shot if you look close), the second hit the screen and the glass exploded with a good 1.5 metre blast radius. It was by far the coolest one to experience. A couple of the later ones flipped and spun it pretty well. The final damage? A couple significant dents, three layers of screen shattered/broken, and one BB permanently embedded in the casing. About 60 photos and about six seconds of video (which slowed down to frame-by-frame show the action significantly blurrier than the photos). Overall? A pretty successful, enjoyable, and teaching photo shoot.
Archipelago Photography- islands of thought and image, connected with a name