049: Glowing Filament

This grimy old light bulb was discovered in the attic when we moved into our current house, nestled among mortar dust and mineral wool.
What's interesting about the setup of this shot is that I connected the bulb to a home-made fader box (dimmer switches wired to sockets) and was able to adjust the bulb's intensity to fine-tune the outcome independently from the shutter speed.
I like the internal reflections on this shot. The image would be no better without them, and they add much interest. They also remind me that it's all encased in glass.

I used 29mm of extension rings to a 50mm M42 lens to get the right degree of magnification for accomodating the filaments comforatbly in the frame. Once I decided that I was going to use f/16 and ISO 100 (the least sensitive settings) for maximum depth of field and detail I took a test exposure with the camera's best guess of metering and faded the bulb's down quite low. The exposure I settled on was 1/10 sec with a slightly dimmer bulb than before, as I got the impresssion that keeping the filament dim would keep some of the finer detail and have less blown-out highlights.
I am not sure if I was right, but I will have to try a similar shot again sometime, and experiment with doing things differently.

008: Sauerkraut Lantern

What better to do on a miserable and freezing cold weekday evening than take experimental flash photographs of jars from the kitchen?
A third-eaten jar of homemade sauerkraut was the champion today, with [relatively] deep tonal range and a pleasing variety of shapes and patterns. The preserved cabbage resembles glowing marmalade when lit from below.
I had to use a long exposure here because the flash underneath the jar (which is in itself mounted on another camera's hotshoe) needed to be manually fired, as I have no off-board flash cable adapter. So it was a case of open the shutter then fire the flash before the shutter closes. Works for me.
Then the exposure had to be compensated by +2 stops in editing as I still felt there was not enough visible low detail in the image, even though that blew out the highlights a bit. An Acceptable loss.
Shoot RAW, and delete bad ones later is my policy.