Cottage on the Lake - Putting in the Dock and Boats

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Last week i went up north to our cottage to help put in the boats and docks. Also my dad and i took apart the aluminum boat hoist. We weren't sure how long it would take, but it ended up only taking a few hours.

A lot of the bolts were rusted from being in the water for several years. Luckily the nuts were at the ends of the bolt, so once we broke them free there wasn't any corroded threads to deal with.

Here is what the boat lift/shore station looked like when it was all taken apart. All of the cables and pulleys are inside of the aluminum beams. And the heaviest part was definitely the white cable crank at the top left.

Also at night i wanted to try taking more pictures with my homemade ND filter, the stars at night and spinning wool. Here's the links to some of those previous pictures and how they are done:

• ND Filter at Lake Erie
• Spinning Wool - Night Photography
• Star Pictures
• Tennessee New Year

Here's the pictures i took with my ND filter. I really like the way it makes the water have a glass surface, it's a very calm and dreamlike photo.

With the photos taken using the welding glass there is some post processing in Photoshop. I have 4 or 5 presets saved so it saves a lot of time since now with just 1 click i can fix the colors. But in a lot of cases, converting the picture to black and white is the best way to emphasize the texture and detail.

Also you can see in this photo that the ND filter acts as a polarizing filter too. It lets you see right into the water.

This was me just experimenting. I had to sit real still for the 30 second exposure.

This is a panorama photo of the lake at night. It was created using 6 pictures, each of them at 53 second exposures. Then i processed them all the same way in Photoshop and combined them into one picture using Autostitch.

(click to enlarge)

I took several pictures of the night sky, but this one turned out the best. I think at first i had the ISO set too low on the camera. I could have forfeit a little bit of added noise for more vibrant pictures. For the panorama i set the ISO at 250, you can see a couple of shooting stars in there too.

This was the spinning wool photos i wanted to try. If you click on the link above you can see the setup i used to hold and light the steel wool.

I was expecting some amazing photographs from this, but none of them were all that great. I think the hardest part was in being the right distance from the camera. You want to be close to the camera to get the dramatic effect, but not so close that all you see is the sparks from the steel wool.

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Spinning Wool - Night Photography

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

When i first saw this type of picture i was sure it was done with some type of firework or sparkler. Then i read the caption and it described it as "spinning wool." So i looked it up online and videos on Youtube and it turns out that it's made by spinning a lit piece of steel wool around in a circle. Here was my first attempts.



I had experimented with taking pictures at night before. About a year ago i did this Snowy Night photography, where i was using a flashlight to write my name.

So the idea is basically the same but the process is a lot more dangerous.

Setup:

• 0000 fine steel wool
• Metal harness
• Wire string
• Lighter
• Hooded sweatshirt
• Bucket of water!!!

Here's what i made as the wire and harness. I just used a coat hanger and some thin gauge wire. As it spins, the steel wool gets pushed to the end of the cage.

I remember reading from a survival book that you can start a fire with a 9 volt battery and steel wool. The charge shorts out on the metal and catches on fire. I remember being amazed that steel wool would burn. So you could use a battery to light it, but a lighter or matches works faster. Here's what the steel wool looks like after it's lit.

http://youtu.be/hBy6H7FXA5w

Now if i just left this there it would gradually turn orange and burn through in about 20 seconds. But by spinning it in a circle, you are adding more air, allowing it to burn faster and the whole process takes just 3 or 4 seconds. The reason these pictures look so cool is that the steel wool actually falls apart as it burns and it looks like a shower of sparks.

Now i didn't have the "bucket of water" when i did this but i definitely will in the future. Luckily it had rained the day before and everything was wet. All of those sparks hitting the ground is a super hot piece of metal and it stays hot for several seconds. It could very easily light something on fire if it were dry. And the hooded sweatshirt is so that if one of the hot sparks lands on your head, which is very likely.

Anyway here are the settings that i had on the camera.

Camera Settings:

• Canon with CHDK
• +-25 seconds exposure
• f/6 aperture
• ISO 250

I would say that you could do this with any digital point and shoot camera but the exposure time is tricky. My camera maxes out at 15 seconds normally. It would probably work, but you would have to crank up the aperture and ISO and it would most likely turn out grainy. So i turned on the CHDK software on my Canon S95 and set the exposure time to 25 seconds. I think that with the settings listed above it gave me a good balance between not overexposing the sparks but not underexposing the dark background. Also i probably should have turned on the RAW setting but i didn't since this was just a test. If i do this again though i would set it to RAW, which would allow for better Photoshop post editing.

As you can see the sparks fly about 30 feet depending on how fast you spin the steel. I tried different things from spinning vertical, horizontal and all different directions. The key is to get close to the camera, without letting one of the sparks damage it. I stayed on the safe side and stood +-40 feet away.

But i am definitely going to try this again sometime. It was fun and the pictures turned out better than i expected.

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