The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Alcohol Mist Flamethrower
Alcohol hand sanitizer pump spray

Our daughter snagged some tchotchkes from a high-school career fair, including one that she instantly recognized as a flamethrower: Antibacterial Hand Sanitizer Spray, 62% Ethyl Alcohol plus some other junk, in a handy pump-spray container. Heck, it even says

Warnings Flammable. Keep away from open flame. Keep out of reach of children.

I was so proud of her…

Flare3.gif

After homework, she stuck a candle atop the garbage can by the garage and fired off a few shots while I ran the camera. Here’s the best one, converted to a low-speed animated GIF.

We’re pretty sure that’s Sweet Babby Jeebus™ in the next-to-last frame of the flare. Maybe Madonna. Could go either way.

Much as with the “movies” I made for trebuchets and tree frogs, I used ffmpeg to shred the camera’s mpg movie into separate jpg images, some bash to select the frames, then convert to stitch them back together into a gif.

The general outline:
```
mkdir Frames
ffmpeg -i mov04990.mpg -f image2 Frames/frame-%03d.jpg
cd Frames
mkdir flare3
for f in `seq 760 780` ; do cp frame-${f}.jpg flare3 ; done
cd flare3
convert -delay 50 frame-* Flare3.gif
```
If my bash-fu was stronger, I could feed the proper file names directly into convert without the copy step.

Now, kids, don’t try this at home. At least not without responsible adult supervision…
2009-11-25
Stick Insect Laying an Egg

Stick Insect Egg Laying an Egg

Another one of my top-ten favorite pix: a landing module docked with an alien interstellar probe.

Actually, it’s a stick insect laying an egg.

Stick insects just drop their eggs onto the forest floor with a stereotyped abdominal shake. This critter was in an aquarium standing on end, so every egg made a little tick when it hit the bottom pane. They do this mostly at night, hence the black background of our living room.

I caught this egg just before release, aiming through the glass wall with an LED flashlight for illumination, through close-up adapters on a DSC-F717 on a tripod. A bit of fiddly image editing got rid of most of the “stars” caused by dirt on the glass, but the insect and egg aren’t edited.

Although stick insects can live for up to three years, we cannot find food for them during the winter months. They’re rather fussy eaters, specializing in oak leaves in these parts, and simply don’t accept substitute meals.

A high-res version serves as the background on my right-hand portrait monitor.

A different view of the eggs is there.

An overall view of the critter, with the two front legs extending frontward along the antennae in a characteristic pose.

Stick Insect – 125 mm overall

2009-11-12
Color Guard Night Practice: Flags

Another picture from the Arlington Marching Band competition at The Dome in Syracuse.

Silhouetted Flags

These are flag twirls against portable mercury-vapor floodlights. The glare off that bare tree make the scene look just about as cold as it really was, even if it wasn’t icy.

The camera picked 1/5 second for this exposure, although the translucent flags don’t show the same strobing as the bright-white rifles. I think the lower floodlight is the same one in the single-rifle picture.

2009-11-11
Color Guard Night Practice: Rifles

Took these pix while chaperoning the Arlington High School Marching Band trip to The Dome at Syracuse University. They’re warming up, if that’s the proper word for standing around in skintight uniforms on a 45-degree evening at Skytop, in preparation for their show.

Many Strobed Rifle Tosses

The ISO 1000 setting on a Sony DSC-H5 produces absolutely terrible color noise, but sometimes it just doesn’t matter. These were taken under low-pressure sodium-vapor parking lot lights, with some mercury-vapor lighting in the background, so they’re basically monochromatic anyway.

Single Strobed Rifle Toss

The shutter is 1/8 second and the lights flicker at 120 Hz, so the rifles reflect 120/8 = 15 blinks as they spin. The similar included angles show that all the rifles spin at nearly the same rate: the Color Guard does very nicely synchronized tosses. They’re good!

Now, for one of my top-ten favorite pictures…

I moved around to put the mercury-vapor light behind her, which prevented flareout & added a crisp edge. The camera managed to get nearly the right exposure, even under considerable duress. This is a crop from a larger image.

She’s absolutely stationary with only her hands moving, exactly the way it’s supposed to be done.

Despite the slow shutter speeds, they’re both hand-held pictures. You simply don’t get to see my botches…

Oh, and by the way. The “rifles” are wooden dummies, carved out in a general rifle-stock shape, but without any metal parts or even a barrel. Frankly, I think the Color Guard should be trained up in marksmanship and carry actual rifles. Perhaps those would work well?

2009-11-10
Here’s Looking (Back) at You

Walkway Webcam on Railing

~~There’s now~~ There was a webcam [Update: dead link] watching the recently opened Walkway Over the Hudson, put on by the Dutchess County Tourism folks.

I couldn’t quite figure out where it was, though, because there aren’t any tall buildings or towers near the Walkway. The area used to be hard industrial, with plenty of smokestacks, but those days and those structures are long gone.

On a recent trip I parked the bike at the end of the chain-link fence on the north side of the bridge, eyeballed back five-and-a-half sections of fence on the south side, and spotted what I’d been missing.

The camera is a bit more than half a mile away, atop the Interfaith Towers building at 66 Washington St, on the northwest corner at Mansion Street. The Google overhead view isn’t up to date; the Walkway’s concrete decking is done and they’re tweaking some of the electrical work even as I type.

The camera’s gooseneck mount lets that loooong telephoto lens vibrate in high winds. When the webcam image looks broken up, new weather is on its way!

The picture is a crop from a larger image, with a bit of color correction and gamma tweakage.

2009-10-27
Cooper’s Hawk in Christmas Angel Mode

Coopers Hawk

Heard two Cooper’s Hawks doing a call-and-response exchange a few mornings ago, with the nearest bird in a tall pine in the back yard. I’m surprised that a one-pound bird can perch on the very tippy-top branch of a pine without bending it over, but they seem to do this quite often.

The picture is a crop from the full frame, taken with a Sony DSC-H5 at full optical zoom with a VCL-HGD1758 1.7x Tele Conversion Lens. There’s plenty of violet fringing in evidence, which is one reason I try not to take high-contrast backlit shots like this.

Here’s a dot-for-dot crop of just the bird to show how bad the fringing really is.

Coopers Hawk Detail – Violet Fringing

It’s better than no picture at all, the way I see it…

2009-10-22
Camouflaged Katydid

Katydid on matching umbrella

This gadget appeared on an umbrella we’d left outdoors to dry.

We wonder if the green surface seemed like a leaf…

2009-10-12