Playing with camera & flash

Got up quite late, about 8am so I missed Ben as he went off to school before I had finished in the bathroom. Had breakfast, went on my comp and checked my emails, ebay, deviantart, and read strobist for a bit.

Went on a walk about 10am, just up to East Farnham and then back the same way. The sun was shining quite warm but the air was cold and it was quite windy. After a while I got too hot in my thick coat though.

A few days ago when I came back from a trip with dad I got my backpack out the boot of the car, but the backpack wasn't done up so my D200 fell on the floor. It had a 67-77mm step up ring on the front because I had been using it earlier with my 77mm B+W polariser, but had taken the polariser off because the sun had gone in, but left the ring on. When the D200 fell on the floor it damaged the 67-77mm ring so I couldn't screw the 77mm filter into it anymore. So today I used my FZ5 as my main camera since I can still use the polariser on that with a 55-77mm step up ring. I've ordered a new 67-77mm ring on ebay, but it will take quite a while to arrive since its from the US and also there's a postal strike in UK at the moment.

Anyway, the walk was nice, some of the trees are in Autumn colours, some have lost their leaves, and lots are still green. Hopefully we will get a nice display of Autumn colours before the wind blows all the leaves off the trees. Hopefully we'll get more sunny weather like today as well.

When I got home I copied all the pics to my PC and processed the ones from the D200 (nearly all of which were from yesterday). I went on strobist a bit more as well. Then I had lunch with granny as moohar and farthner had gone out for lunch.

After lunch I had to do a bit of work work, then I sorted out the photos and went on strobist a bit more. I tried taking photos of water droplets splashing into a cup but I think the dropper I have makes too small drops. Then it was dinner.

After dinner me, ben and yumpt made some phrases with his total film film quote magnets, which are famous film quotes, with one word on each magnet, so you can just put the words in whatever order you like to make up your own phrases. They give you quite a lot of them so you can make lots of stupid phrases as well as the proper ones if you want. Then I did the washing up, after that I tried taking photos of an ice cube dropping into a glass, which I did for the rest of the evening.

I used the D200 with on camera flash set to commander mode, power --, and an SB-800 near the glass in remote mode, set to TTL. First I tried taking photos with the glass in front of the bathroom window, and the window open as much as possible. Unfortunately, the window still was quite a lot in the shots. After doing this for ages I tried taking shots outdoors. That was better in the background was cleaner and black, but I couldn't see whether the focus was correct or not, I have to manual focus the lens since I am using the 18-70mm with an M-CON35 as the lens doesn't focus close enough normally.

I did have a break from doing this for a bit, and went on wii fitness and golf target practice with ben. I also put my ghillie suit on and stood on the stairs when granny came out the living room to go to the loo, but she didn't see me. Then I crouched down in the downstairs hall and Ben sat on me so granny could see when she came out of the loo. Whn she came out she just said how Ben had one sock on and one sock off and that his feet must be chilly. Moohar asked her if she thought ben's seat was wierd, and she said it looked like a dog, so I said woof and I think she realised that it was a person, so I got up slowly and she wasn't scared which was good.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; 2x cocktail tomatoes; satsuma; plum; slice of all butter madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken nuggets; macaroni cheese with black pepper on top; broccoli; corn on the cob. Pudding was a slice of swiss roll and I also had a breakaway. Coffee. Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Yesterday
Made up some ikea shelves to put all my pog stuff on instead of it being all over my floor. Unfortunately we only had 2 spare big shelves, and while we had quite a few smaller shelves, we only seem to have enough of the steel bits for 4 shelves (so I put up 2 big shelves and 2 small shelves). Putting up the shelves took quite a while since I had to drill holes in one of the shelf supports. Then I spent most of the rest of the day tidying my room and putting the pogs stuff away.

My photography backdrop stand arrived by DHL, so I unpacked that and put it up. One of the screws was totally hard to undo and also it didn't come with any instructions. Also, some paint on one the joins broke off. Eventually I managed to put it together. Probably still quite good for £50, since a lot of other sellers would charge about £40 just for the postage.

I also put my ghillie suit on and showed moohar and farthner.

When Ben came home from school I tried taking photos of some flies and Ben helped me take some photos of flowers.

I went on strobist a bit, and in the evening I tried adding a rim light to some boxes in my room, which didn't work very well because the light from the flash spilled out too much. Also, the flash from the camera did flash even though it was set to -- which is meant to be off. Using an SB800 as master, and pointing the head into the air solved this problem, although I don't know if this would work outside since the infra red light probably just bounced off the ceiling. You can get an IR filter for the D200's built in flash so that only the IR signal gets out, I don't think you can get one for SB800, and I don't know if you can buy it in UK anyway.

Then I went to bed

Food
Can't remember what I ate yesterday.