One of the interesting techniques I hadn’t still tried until now was to capture an exploding water balloon just in the moment the plastic breaks, but the water still has the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism that wouldn’t give me the perfect timing but maybe an acceptable approach.

Materials I used:

• 2 sewing needles

• A pice of plastic of about 20cm of length to build the lever.

• 3 meter camera cable (for ease, depending on camera position)

• A plastic washbowl

• A small flash with wireless remote

• A bag of small water balloons

• A hot glue gun if possible (or just glue)

• A tripod to hold the mechanism and water balloon, and another to hold the camera.

• A mop!

Camera and flash settings:

• Shutter of 1/100 or similar is enough, because we’ll illuminate the water balloon with the small flash only.

• I recommend using an apperture of f/8 or narrower, because sometimes water goes in many directions and this way we’ll get more dof.

• For the tests the flash was at 0.5m approx, at 1/64 of power. I recommend using the lowest power if possible to get a more sharp result.

• Camera focus must be set to manual and I also recommend to adjust the frame for each photo since the size of the water balloons is not always the same.

Shutter trigger construction:

About the shutter trigger, my Canon 5D MKII uses an N3 connector, so I cut an old shutter cable to build the new one. It has three wires (Ground, Shutter, Focus) that will allow us to make a photo by doing a short circuit between Shutter and Ground wires. I’ve marked with a green dot the two necessary pins in the photo of the N3 connector. It’s not necessary to use the Focus wire since the camera will be in manual focus.

To build the other side of the wire, I welded each wire (Shutter, Ground) to a needle. Then I used the hot glue gun to attach the needles to a long piece of plastic with a little inclination so that if the needles touch a rigid surface they will touch each other. My initial idea was that the water of the balloon would short circuit the two wires, but at practice it didn’t result in my case, so with a little inclination in the needles they also touched each other when breaking the water balloon.

To hold the lever I used the materials I had at home, but it’s possible to hold it in many other (and better) ways.

Once the setup is mounted, a water balloon is hold with a string in front of the lever so that when the lever is released it will break the balloon and the needles will also touch each other to activate the camera shutter and make the photo, so the only thing we have to do is hold the lever in a higher position and release it to make each photo.

Photos of the parts and results:

Video of the mechanism in action:

As you can see the results are quite different between each other, because the timing was a little unpredictable. There are a lot of ways to improve this first test, trying to anticipate the explosion by placing the shutter cables in another place in the lever or changing the way the wires touch each other.

Opinions and questions welcomed

Create a tool that projects a laser net to combine with the Light Painting photography technique, so that when projecting this net over a scene, it “seems” to be a wireframing view of a 3D modeled scene.

Solution:

Using only one laser pointer, create a set of horizontal and vertical lines that combined with the photo long exposure will result in a laser net. The laser pointer is moved by two RC servos controlled with a PWM signal generated by a 16F876A PIC microcontroller.
Once the circuit is done, the program can be configured to change laser speed, offset between lines and net size.

For the video I used a 7.4V LiPo battery, the voltage is regulated by a 7805, and the laser pointer uses one of the PIC 5V outputs with a 25 Ohms resistor.

Demonstration video with photo samples:

Flickr’s Explore is a ranking in which the best 500 photos of the day are selected by using an unkown algorithm.

This algorithm (called “interestingness“) doesn’t really select the “best” photos of the day, but getting into explore is a good way to gain visibility on your photos, because when a photo is on explore some of the people which is seeing the explore page (or some other sites showing current photos on Explore) can see your photo (aka more views, comments, etc).
Once on explore, the photo will be moving up or down the ranking (from #1 to #500) during the day, depending on your photo comments, views and other, but also by other photos entering on explore.

To see which of your photos are on explore, there’s the Flickr Scout.

I’ve had 40 explores just this year, so I wanted to share some of the things I’ve noticed. Some may be very obvious but I wanted to share all the steps I usually do:

• Use as many (useful) tags as you can to gain visibility, not just about the subject of the photo but also the technique and gear used.

• Add the photo to some of your sets or collections (if it’s a b/w macro you can put the photo on two different sets).

• Add the photo to a max of 5-6 groups. Not the kind of groups in which commenting is mandatory (like P1A50). Instead, add it to a more general groups (Canon/Nikon..) that aren’t about any specific subject so you can use the same groups for each photo you upload.

• Getting favorites and notes is also helpful, especially if they aren’t contacts of yours. This is more complicated to control, but I think it influences too.

• Once the photo is on flickr, you can share the link on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to gain some more visibility.

• Upload time may be important too. I always upload my photos between 20:00h and 23:00h (GMT+1). If that same night I get about 50 views, 8 comments or so, sometimes the photo appears on Explore the next day.

• One interesting trick I’ve seen, is that you can change the upload time of photos which already are uploaded, so you can “refresh” the upload when you want, and all the contacts seeing the last photos will see your photo again (maybe they didn’t see it the first time). If you didn’t get explore the first day, you have another chance using this trick. Using this, I’ve had the same photo two and even three times on explore on different days. It can also be boring for your contacts if you do this too much…

• Of course, uploading a great photo will help too, or at least a subject that a lot of people likes (shallow dof, bokeh, colorful captures, beautiful portraits, cats, landscapes…).

As I said, appearing on Explore doesn’t mean having the best photos, but it helps to get more visibility.

From my experience, the learning curve is based on what I’ve just mentioned and two more factors that I’ll explain now, but in a different perspective than the typical “learn, practice, learn, practice”. What I find more interesting is what do we think about the results we’re getting. Are they good, bad? Are we proud of them? Which aspect would have a better result?

The first and more important factor is what I call State of Your art. If you were asked to position your work in a “quality ranking” among everything you know about that subject, where do you think it would be? You’ll probably think there’s a lot of people already better than you at that, and still more if you’re just beginning, but knowing the State of Your art will allow you to have an imprecise but also global reference, and wou’ll not be disappointed when you find out somebody else had the same idea as you and executed it in a much better way, or with a slight difference that you wouldn’t have thought of. Knowing the State of Your art won’t give you so much satisfaction when creating something new, but neither you’ll be disappointed if you discover that your idea was already done, because you already knew that this could happen.

How do you know your position in the ranking? Suppose there’s still a lot to see, that there’s somebody better than you, and that you still have a lot to learn. Thinking this way won’t give you an exact position, but I believe it’s an appropiate attitude to have. I find interesting and useful to read and talk with other professionals, to see how they work and also to learn and inspire myself, but I also think it’s important to develop a personal style that, while being influenced by some others’ works, are the product of our vision as an artists and professionals.

The second factor which I find necessary to improve is self-criticism. Just before creating something, many times comes the initial euphoria of “This is amazing!”. It’s fine to feel this way at first, but then it’s necessary to place your new work in the ranking of what you know and settle down.

I think the previous factors allow us not only create better art, but also better products and services, as long as exists a continuity and passion in what is being done, without thinking about getting huge results, just to improve, do someting meaningful and setting personal goals, the rest will follow.

3D MAX 2011 + VRay, GI only. I used some planes on the top of the gears to get the different colors, thanks for viewing.

My purpose was to build a high power LED torch with the possibility to hang it from a chain or string so I could spin it or rotate it fast enough to draw an orb or other objects and still getting a bright result in the photo, because a typical LED torch or flashlight works well when trying to draw letters or lines in the light painting, because we move slowly, but when we move the flashlight much faster, the lines and spirals look much weaker, that’s why is useful to use high power LEDs, to see the light painting clearly. In addition, the batteries would add more weight at the end of the string, facilitating the spinning of the torch.

Component list:
- 1x 4 AA battery holder
- 3x high power SMD LEDs
- 1x PCB (1cm x 13cm approx.)
- 1x switch

The electrical circuit is very simple, basically there’s a 5ohms resistor and 3 SMD LEDs in parallel. The LEDs work at 3.8V with a power consumption of 350mA, but in this case I used a little higher resistor so the LEDs could still make more light, but I prefered a longer battery duration.

The circuit is divided in three small PCBs with one LED in each one, to illuminate in three different directions during the light painting.

To attach a string to the LED torch, I’ve added a M3 screw in the top part, but I still have to find an appropiate string or chain to use.

To make an orb with light painting you have to spin the LED torch with your wrist while you rotate slowly around yourself. This will create the effect of some sort of sphere, you can find a lot of examples of this technique.

I still haven’t tried it properly, I hope to post a new photo using this tool soon in my photography section, thanks for reading.

Not every scene will be better in HDR (High dynamic range), this technique is appropiate when the scene we’re capturing has some very dark or very bright parts (completely black or white parts). Sometimes our eyes can see these differences properly, but the camera’s sensor has less dynamic range than our eyes so some information will be lost. For example, a very bright sky but with dark shadows on the ground is a typical situation. But even in this kind of situations, it’s good to ask yourself which result do you prefer, getting all parts of the photo correctly exposed, or take advantage of this contrasted lights and get just the silhouettes of the mountains. In that case it wouldn’t be necessary to make an HDR.

For this tutorial I’ll suppose you know how to use the basic features of Photomatix, to get at least “ugly” results.

Before starting with the photomatix options, it’s important to say that to get a good result, it’s very important to start with a good set of photos. The typical bracketing option of the DSLRs usually offers +1, 0 and -1 steps between each of the three photos it does. I always to it manually, because I think sometimes it’s not enough with three photos, and sometimes I prefer doing the photos with less than 1 step between each one. I usually do 2/3 of a step between each one. I also start with the brightest frame, then I take several shots, lowering each time 2/3 of a step, and I do the necessary photos until I think it’s dark enough and it’s useless to make more photos. I recommend that if you can do more than three, do it, and once processing, you can choose if it will look better with three or more captures. The only two possible disadvantages of not using bracketing is that you may move slightly the camera while changing the exposure of each shot, and the other disadvantage is that you need to be quick if you’re capturing a landscape with clouds, because if it tooks you more than some seconds the clouds won’t be at the same place on the next photos. This last thing is something you need to avoid, because once in photomatix, when aligning the whole set of captures, it’s possible that the program uses the clouds to align instead of your main subject!

Also, photomatix allows you to make Pseudo-HDRs with only one RAW file, and then it does the bracketing, but this way the results tend to be much more noisy, so I recommend doing always separate captures, except when the scene has motion, in which case it wouldn’t be possible. My recommendations are the same for both methods, but my example will be with only one photo (on the right, 6″ exposure, ISO 400 and f/4.5). I tried to make a proper exposure because I just had the opportunity to do one photo (I was the last visitor that day).

Now these are the controls which I consider more important:

• Strength: The name says it clearly, the more strength, more irreal and contrasted will be the result. I think that what it does is to let the darker captures manifest more than the bright ones. If you really want a real result, keep it low. This will also help to improve the noise of the photo. If lowering this parameter the photo becomes too bright, you can control this using the next parameters, do not increase again the strength just to get it nice exposed!

• Color saturation: I personally like it a little saturated, this way I have the enough color information on the photo to increase or decrease it later in Lightroom. Even when I know that the photo will be in b/w I save it in color, maybe I realise later that it could be more interesting in color.

• Luminosity: One of the most important controls, keep it as low as you can, it’s true that will be hard to get all the parts of the photo correctly exposed, but believe me, if you start with a good set of captures with slight exposure differences, this won’t be a problem. The error a lot of people does is to put a lot of luminosity, when I see these captures I think “oh, he used Photomatix”, because it’s very typical to get blurry and false results with this control, so keep it low!

• Light Smoothing: One of the controls people thinks is cool at the beginning but also betrays that you used Photomatix. Depending on the position, different parts of the photo will be nice exposed, but as you get more parts good exposed, is when you get irreal results again. In very low or low, equals science fiction, so try to use always high or very high. Very high is the smoothest choice, which will expose especially the center part of the photo. Sometimes is better the High option, which affects to the whole photo and depending on the capture can give better results, its your choice to see which one fits better with your photo, but I don’t recommend using a lower value of this control.
  

• Microcontrast: Another important control, in combination with Luminosity, affects dramatically to the overall result, and I recommend to move it as high as you can. If you used a very low Luminosity you can decrease a little this value to get a little more of light if you need it, but you’ll also lose contrast.

• The White Point and Black Point is a personal choice, using a higher black point will give darker results, which you can compensate with the white point, but any radical choice will result in an irreal result or more noise, or both.

• Temperature: I use the same for most of my captures. If you don’t touch the temperature control, after processing several photos you can observe that it give kind of orange/yellow tone to all the photos, so to compensate that, I use a lower temperature (usually -3 or -4) to get the correct color.

• Micro-smoothing: This control can give more textures and details to your photo when it has a low value (typically 2), and you can even get more details with 1 or 0, but with this slight changes the noise of the photo can dramatically increase, so again, if you want real results, try to use a value greater than 2, there’s no problem if you move it very high.

There are some other controls but I think they’re less important, you can even leave them by default, but one thing I noticed is that’s complicated to get sharp results using only Photomatix. I usually export the file to tiff format and import it in Oloneo software (http://www.oloneo.com), just to increase the sharpness of the result, otherwise it may look dreamy or even blurry.

I hope this was helpful to somebody, below there’s the resulting image processed with Photomatix, then Oloneo for increase sharpness, and then imported to Lightroom to do some slight changes of contrast and temperature. In fact
this photo is not very realistic, but what I wanted was to explain how to get more real results.