Fisheye photoing

Some funny videos I've watched recently:

• How is Babby formed?


• Blinky Bill opening català
  
• inspector gadget opening català - the bloke singing sounds weird
  
• las tortugas ninja opening catalan (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
  

After watching those videos I went on the pinternet for a while. Re-named and moved the pics I took yesterday, then backed up my pictures. I watched a load of videos about Canon lenses on the canon japan website. Next I tried taking some photos with a piece of A4 paper rubber banded to the flash to act as a large bounce card. I wanted to see if it would give the nice bounce effect you get when bouncing flash off the ceiling, except it would also be useable outdoors and in places with high ceilings. Here's the results:

• Flash aimed at the ladder, no bounce. You can see the shadow is quite harsh, but the flash needs a lot less power (a good few stops) than when it's bounced.
  
• Flash aimed at about 60° upwards, with A4 paper acting as a large bounce card. Shadow is softer and not as dark, but still visible.
• Flash aimed at about 75° with small flash's built in bounce card up. Shadow still visible, but only just.

Probably I should do some reading on strobist or something to find out about getting nice flash outdoors.

After that de Blob arrived in the post for the Wii, so me, Ben and Maccy played on that for a bit. Clare wanted to go out somewhere and take lunch with us, but me and Ben didn't want to eat a picnic out and Mac said he didn't want to go out without me and Ben, so we ate lunch at home. Then after lunch Clare said she didn't want to go out any more.

Ben played on De Blob a bit more, then I got my fisheye lens to try and take a picture of Granny when she was asleep (or pretending to be asleep) but then she woke up before I could. So I took photos of Ben and Mac instead. I found that using just the onboard flash, just one side of their head would be lit. So I got my Wimberley Macro bracket and put an SB800 on that in remote mode, so it was placed on the other side of the lens opposite the onboard flash. I found that that was too powerful, even at 1/128 power, so I put a diffuser in it with some folded up tissue paper and that toned it down to a reasonable level. The lens was set at f/3.5.

I carried on taking pics (indoors), but always the face would be lit okay but the rest of the image would be dark. So after a while I placed another SB800 in remote mode and about ¼ power, pointing at the ceiing to bounce, on the stack of DVDs on the CD shelf in Mac's room. This worked quite well, and exposed the rest of the room nicely although the wall and ceiling around where the flash were were blown out.

Clare said Ben had to go on a walk to get some exercise, so me and Mac went on a walk with him, along the road to Church, and then up the alley to the field, across the field to the track, along the track a little way, then back down the side of the field (I never knew a footpath went down there before). I took my fisheye potrait setup with me, to see how well it worked outdoors. First of all, I had to increase the shutter speed to 1/250s and then since that's the max sync speed of the camera I had to decrease the aperture to f/8 to get a reasonable exposure where the sky wasn't blown out. I then had to remove the tissue paper and increase the flash power to compensate for the decrease in aperture.

It was quite cloudy. I found that looking towards the sun, a large part of the sky would be blown out. Looking away from the sun (when it was out) you could easily see my shadow in the shots. So looking at right angles to the sun should be best.

When the sun was out, exposures were quite good, but when the sun went in, I would need to drop the shutter speed to about 1/40s and this would make the ground still quite dark compared to when it was sunny, and also blow out the sky a lot more. It also introduced motion blur (sometimes wanted, sometimes not).

Sometimes (outside) the SB800 didn't fire (not surprising since it's receptor wasn't in the line-of-sight of the onboard flash). So it would probably be better to connect it to the camera with a PC cable than use it in remote mode.

After we got home I started to process the images, and I found that in all of the flashes seem to have made some 'hot' points on the face. Shadows in some shots were also quite harsh. So tomorrow I will need to test diffusion to see what can be done (I'm thinking inflatable softbox on the SB800 and Puffer on the onboard flash).

After dinner I processed a few more of the fisheye shots, then me, Mac and Ben watched Superman. After we'd watched half of it Ben had to go to bed so we stopped watching it and I finished processing the fisheye pics.

I forgot to put in yesterday's post, the 400/2.8 IS lens I was looking at on ebay ended up at £2,850, much more than I was willing to pay. Still quite a bit cheaper than the cheapest one curently on ebay (£4200 new from HK). It seems that it was a scam anyway, as the seller now has some negative feedback saying 'This is a scam!!! - Asked me to pay through MoneyGram - I will not be proceeding'.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Slice of breadmaker-made bread; Fabulous Bakin' Boys Lemon iced cupcake; Waver (like a dark chocolate Montana) choc bic; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Pack of Chilli Heatwave flavour Doritos; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Toad in the hole; potato; peas; sweetcorn; carrots; roast parsnip; mustard; gravy. Pudding was a piece of Tiramisu. Coffee.