323: Amazon

Last night was a foggy one, and I ventured into the cold to grab some shots of buildings and lights in the foggy night air. Only on starting back home did I notice the fair had come to town, and I noticed this dramatic angle of a large ride with a floodlight behind the sign.

Settings: f/8, 6s, ISO 100, DA 14-45 (45mm,) tripod. Levels & colour adjustments, cleanup.

230: Half and Half

Settings: f/4, 1/5, ISO 100, 50mm Cosinon M42, 26mm extension, halogen light, tripod.

117: Spooky Street Lamp

Settings: f/2.8, 1/50, ISO 400, 28mm M42, EOS D30.

102: Soft Light Rings

Spooky effects from a hanging lampshade and a mirror lens. It rather looks like evening light seen through a bushy canopy.
Deliberately out of focus, of course. I didn't even try, as when the lampshade came into focus the whole image detracted from the effect I liked shown here.

Settings: f/8, 1/160, ISO 200, 500mm Tamron SP mirror lens, 50mm extension, tripod.

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.

019: Light & Glass

A tower of glass and metal stands before you, radiating an eerie central glow through transparent walls of irregular detail. Imagine if any buildings actually looked like this close up - it would be fascinating, but you might wonder how stable the structure would be.
It's actually the side of a lamp, made from a brickwork-like lattice of glass pieces held together with a lot of wire. An 11W CFL light sits in the centre, possibly biasing the colour output (although I still don't think it looks quite green enough.) The light falls off quite attractively at the edges, but not due to lens vignetting.
DA 18-55 (@26mm,) f/13, 1/10 sec. Postprocessed with +0.66 EV, some highlight compression, a little straightening and white balance adjustment. In hindsight, it may have also done well with a little added contrast.