Old Ektachromes

A plumber came and an electrician and both needed to look under the floorboards beneath a cupboard. I cleared the cupboard, and at the back found slides of Peter Cattaneo who directed The Full Monty back in 1997. They must have been there untouched for twelve years!
I remember using a single Elinchrom studio flash with a huge soft box - about 1.5 metres across - and a 70-200 zoom. The grey background was the wall of some preview cinema that we borrowed for half an hour.

James Dyson launched his latest invention on Tuesday; the 'Dyson Air Multiplier', or desk fan without blades. A small fan inside the base blows air out through an annular slit in the back of the blue hoop, which has the effect of drawing more air through the hoop, thus saving much electrcity. He said it worked using the viscosity of air. I think it uses Bernoulli's principle - moving air has a lower pressure than still air and low pressure attracts more air, just like a low pressure weather system. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

James came over as a really nice guy, who was perfectly happy to risk making a fool of himself farting about with a scrap of handkerchief.

I took the photographs using the glass table of a conference room at the Dyson HQ in Malmesbury, Wilts, using a single Elinchrom 1500 joule flash bounced off a white wall on my left, and a six foot flat silver reflector slightly behind and to the right of him to fill in the shadows. It was very simple arrangement giving some latitude for him to move around without the exposure going awol - and made up on the spur of the moment. I spent an hour with press officer Mario Seisdedos Garcia (Yes! That's Mario Sixfingers Garcia!) setting up and refining the picture before James arrived, and the handkerchief was his idea.

Available light with low energy bulbs and Canon digital SLRs.

Now that tungsten household bulbs are to be phased out there is a little problem for digital camera users. There is no setting for low energy bulbs. There's AWB (auto white balance) sunshine, cloud, tungsten, fluorescent tubes and so on, but nothing for the new bulbs. Picture 1 shows how AWB copes with the light from a low energy bulb.

The whites are not very white! The colour meter suggests setting 3100 Kelvin as a colour temperature if you have this facility. There's an improvement, but it's still not right:

So, leaving it at set at 3100K we go to White Balance Shift in the menu and drag the little cursor right down to the bottom left, setting B9 and M9 (I've set Blue 8 and Magenta 8 here so that the cursor is visible).

And here's the result - reasonably white whites and grey greys, and the red, green and blue don't look to bad either. This applies to Canon digital SLR cameras.

I can't vouch for other makes, but hey, have a poke about in the menu, because they'll probably have similar stuff that you can manipulate.

MoonWindow

MoonWindow
Originally uploaded by jpequal1

View from my window, Canon EOS5D MkII, iso6400 (asa) 1/10th @ 2.8, camera held against the window frame.