Not getting much done

Most of this week I have been helping out with the Holiday at Home activities for older people. Most days I was just moving tables etc. before and after dinner. This takes more time than it sounds like it should though, and often you are just waiting around for people.

On Wednesday I also did a session in the morning (doing polymer clay modelling). On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I managed to get an article written for my photo tips website, but didn't get anything else done. A lot of my other time I spent researching trips to Chernobyl.

On Thursday Holiday at Home had a trip to the zoo, so there wasn't too much for me to do. I did have to help McRad fetch some computers and just made sure that one worked okay. I kind of managed to get quite a bit done on this day.

Although I did a lot of work, I didn't really have much to show for it. I was working on my ebay wordpress plugin, and it is so long since I last did any work on it, ebay have changed the way a few things work. I also made quite a few mistakes in my coding, which required debugging. It still needs quite a bit more work until it gets in a usuable state.

On Friday I thought I should be able to get quite a bit of work done, since I didn't have any article to write for my photo tips website. (I try to write 3 articles a week). I set up the computers for Holiday at Home about 9am, but then the rest of the morning I only managed to check my emails!

I can't remember what I was doing the rest of the day, probably I was playing with my new Baader U filter.

My experimentations on Friday didn't work as I had no way of attaching my only suitable lens for use with the filter to the camera. But today (Saturday) I received the M42 to Nikon F mount adapter I was waiting for. I tried some natural light shots, but it required very long shutter speeds (~20s), and it was windy. Also, I have no way of focusing the lens.

Most flowers I tried to take photos of (I only tried 4 different flowers) didn't seem to have any UV markings. But the Greater Willowherb does look a little different in UV than it does in natural light. You'll have to excuse the rubbish blurry photo:

The centre of the flower and the sexual parts of the flower look dark in the UV photo, but in visible light they are white, you can see a visible light photo of what the Greater Willowherb flower looks like here: Greater Willowherb (from Nature Conservation Imaging WETLANDS - FLORA).

The other thing I received this week is a Kodak 1A Pocket Jr. camera, which I bought for the bellows. The camera costs about the same as the bellows by themselves. Removing the bellows might be a bit more difficult than I first thought though. Here is a photo taken through the bellows with my 5D2 and the Kodak's lens wide open:

I couldn't hold the bellows mount flush to the camera body (the camera grip got in the way). So there was quite a large gap between the bellows and the lens mount. I think this is why the image is quite low contrast.