On Thursday, I had an opportunity to go out shooting photographs with a friend of mine, Irvin. We met up in the Depot Town area of Ypsilanti, and, as it happened, the Thursday night car show was in full swing. Every Thursday during the summer, the section of Cross Street that makes up Depot Town is closed off, and filled with vintage cars:
With such a huge selection of interesting cars to photograph, Irvin and I were on our way, exchanging ideas and enjoying the chance to hang out.
As the sun set and the light started to fade, I realized I might have an opportunity to pull off a shot I’d had in my head for quite a while now. I really enjoy making long-exposure photos (see some examples on Flickr), and I’d been interested in combining that with my interest in portraiture. Irvin agreed to participate, so we hiked up the hill to Huron Street, and Irvin graciously allowed me to use his extremely nice tripod (thanks again!). I quickly got a baseline exposure of 5 seconds, which let me see the light trails from passing cars as well as some natural light from the skyline:
I’d brought along a small hotshoe flash and my radio triggers, so I combined a CTO-gelled flash (to match the orangey light of the background scene) with a 5-second exposure, and turned out this portrait:
The flash froze Irvin as he stood there, and the long exposure time let the light trails burn in nicely. I did a couple more long exposures as Irvin tried some of his own, and then we called it a night.
This week’s project was a fun one. I’ve been playing lap-slide guitar for a long time. After college, I put it down for a while, and then picked it back up again 10 years ago or so when I was strictly making electronic music, as a way to make some music that was much more immediate. While my heavy Shubb-Pearse bar works great for a real slide guitar, you really need a hollow slide for playing electric guitar, and I didn’t have one anymore, so I decided to make my own glass bottleneck slide this week.
If you decide to try this at home, PUT ON EYE PROTECTION before you do anything else! I wear glasses, and I still put a pair of safety glasses over them so I’d have side shields and shatter protection in front of my eyes.
To make my DIY bottleneck slide, I took an old wine bottle, gently clamped it in a vise, and used a Dremel with cutoff wheel to score all around the neck.
After scoring it all around the neck, I gently tapped the body of the bottle with a hammer, and the neck broke off cleanly.
The edges are quite sharp still at this point, so I swapped a grinder/sander attachment onto the Dremel and went to work, smoothing and grinding down the sharp edges so it would be comfortable on my finger.
I made my first one of these on Tuesday night but didn’t take any photos to document the process, so I made another one this afternoon and shot the pictures you see here. I’m planning on giving one of them to another friend who plays electric guitar. Here are the finished products!
I’ve been massively influenced by a number photographers over the past year or so, and none more than Zach Arias. His photo critiques, blog posts, and teaching sessions have been a great source of inspiration and learning, and have helped shape my ideas about what I want to do as a photographer. More recently, I’ve been reading David duChemin’s “VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography”, which nicely compliments Zach’s ideas. David’s book makes you really focus on what you’re about as a photographer, and it both inspired and shaped this recent portfolio update.
This week, I spent some time moving my music studio into a new space in our house. I know it seems like I just reorganized my studio, but this time it was different – my family has a renter coming to stay with us for a few months, so I’ve temporarily relocated.
Along with moving into the new studio space, I spent some time working on updating, editing, and cleaning up some tracks that have been in progress for quite a while now. Here’s a set of 3 snippets from upcoming new tracks. I have not yet decided on how I’ll be releasing this, but it’s getting closer…
Here are some photos from the process of moving into the new space:
One of the things I wanted to make sure of is that I put some artwork on the walls, so I took 2 pieces by my friend Shawn Johnson, and 3 of my photographs, and quickly put them up. They’re not framed, but at least they’re there.
On Saturday, July 31, I will be speaking at the Maker Faire Detroit, giving a 5-minute Ignite presentation about my 52 things project. This week’s project, in a meta turn, was preparing my presentation for the event.
Ignite is a chance for people to get up and speak about their passion for 5 minutes. Each talk is timed, with an automatically-advancing slideshow that accompanies it. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, for a total of 20 slides. You can read more about the Ignite event if you’re interested.
I hope you can come and see the Maker Faire Detroit, and hear me present about this great year-long experiment!
This project is one that has been in my “to do” list for well over a year: a servo-powered pan/tilt camera mount!
My intention in making this is to have something that I can use for several purposes. First, it seems like it would work great on my DIY Camera Crane (although I haven’t tried it yet, just having finished the pan/tilt mount today). In addition, I love the idea of being able to put a camera on this and having it either randomly or programatically panning and tilting while I’m doing something else (like playing music).
I was definitely inspired by this build, featured in Make Magazine, Volume 19, entitled “MIDI Camera Control”:
I liked the pre-made brackets they mentioned, but figured I’d try my hand at fabricating my own first, partly to save money and partly because it seemed pretty straightforward.
To start out, I decided to build a quick prototype out of Lego, powered by a Lego Mindstorms NXT motor & brick. Because Lego is so easy to work with, I was able to make a quick prototype in an evening:
Once I had that done, it was time to start the real build. I had a couple of servos already, as well as an Arduino board, and my plan was to use the Arduino to control & power the servos. Servos (formally “servomotors”) are small electric motors whose position can be controlled, so they’re perfect for this project.
I wasn’t sure what to build the bracket itself out of, but I quickly settled on using Erector, as it bridged the gap nicely between “fast to build with” and “durable enough to support a camera”. The physical build came together pretty smoothly. Here are some photos from that process:
After I’d assembled the bracket and servos, I connected them to the Arduino and started trying to figure out the code to drive them. I’m embarrassed to say that I wasted a day trying to drive the servos from the Arduino’s analog in pins (doh!) instead of the digital output pins. After a few hours down the drain, I gave up and started afresh the next day, and quickly found this helpful video from Make Magazine, which described using servos with the Arduino:
I got the servos hooked up, and did some quick coding in the Arduino environment, along with building the necessary circuit to hook the servos up to the Arduino itself.
Before too long (and after much consulting of the arduino.cc website, especially this SingleServoExample page), I had the Arduino controlling the servos and moving the camera around!
Unfortunately, I had chosen to use continuous servos at first. A continuous servo can spin infinitely in either direction, whereas a standard servo has a limited range. The difference in programming these is that you can tell a standard servo to move from 0 degrees to 180 degrees, where with a continuous servo, you only have control over the speed and direction the motor is turning.
I quickly realized I needed to swap my continuous servos for standard ones, which I luckily had a pair of as well. Once that was done, it became much easier to tell the pan/tilt mount to point in a particular direction.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any video available yet from the updated bracket, as I’ve just finished it. I’ll get some together and update this post once I do. However, I’m quite excited by the progress I made on this project!
My next steps are to get some good controls built and in place for the pan/tilt bracket – either physical controls (like knobs) or computer-based controls, likely built in Processing. That way, I can either manually control it or automate it to pan and tilt while I’m doing other things. Also, the Erector is a bit wobbly, and it would be great to replace it with a bracket made from flat aluminum stock, or something similar. MicroRax might be perfect, but it’s expensive.
This week, I attended the ASM Materials Science for Teachers workshop, and produced a few interesting little pieces of physical artwork. That’s unusual for me, but it was a nice change of pace.
The main piece I worked on was an aluminum casting of the chromedecay logo. In order to make this piece, I first traced the chromedecay logo onto a piece of paper, then carefully cut that out and traced it onto a piece of XPS foam (the kind of thing used to insulate houses).
After that was ready, it was off to Joyworks, an art studio and metal foundry.
John Keough, CEO of Applied Process and owner of the Joyworks studio, graciously hosted our workshop’s members, and guided us through the process of turning our foam pieces into cast aluminum, using a lost foam casting process.
In the end, I wasn’t entirely happy with how my piece turned out, and I still have some work to do with a drill press in order to clean it up, but it was a fun change of pace from my usual music and photography artistic endeavours.
For this week’s project, I decided to give my personal online presence a complete refresh, in order to pursue some new opportunities. I’ve maintained billvanloo.com for many years in order to have an online presence for the other things I do besides running chromedecay. This week, it got a total overhaul and refresh.
The first part of this refresh involved upgrading to WordPress 3.0. I had been running WordPress 2.9 for quite some time, and was excited to hear that 3.0 had been released. It is a great new release, and upgrading was quite simple. The automated upgrade process ran smoothly, and before long, I was happily running WordPress 3.0.
The next step was moving all of my static content into WordPress, taking advantage of its Pages capability. As with chromedecay (before its own refresh at the beginning of this year), I had been using my own custom PHP-and-HTML solution for maintaining static pages, but I was eager to move all of this into WordPress in order to make content maintenance easier to do.
At the moment, I’m using the new twentyten theme that comes with WordPress. I did some modifications to the theme, like tweaking the CSS and suppressing the title on the front page, but for the most part it works great right out of the box.
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to refresh the site was to focus on my burgeoning photography pursuit. I’ve had some successful photoshoots over the past few months, and I have several more lined up in the future, including my first paid work. I needed a way to showcase my photography and show a focused portfolio.
After a quick look at PhotoShelter, I decided on using the NexGEN Gallery WordPress plugin to power my photography section. It has a pretty nice administration interface for uploading photos, and includes an elegant lightbox-style popup for viewing photos full-size.
One thing I realized I needed to do was start watermarking my photos, so I wrote a quick Photoshop action to open a file, add the watermark, add a 10-pixel black frame, and resize it. I can now point that action at a batch of files and have it automatically produce resized & watermarked images, ready for upload to the site.
I also started a Twitter account specifically for my photography pursuits. You can follow me @billvanloophoto. This is my first foray into Twitter, so having it limited to a focused aspect of my work is nice. My plan is to use it to follow photographers I like, post interesting links to my own work and that of others, and (once I start getting more clients & paid work), offering promotional offers.
I’m excited to launch this new chapter of my story as an artist!
This week’s project for 52 things was a pair of projects, both photography-based. The first is a set called “vacation colors”, the second is a set of portraits I shot for friends of mine.
The second set of photos was a self-assignment, where I asked friends of mine to model for me and help me improve my portrait photography. My friends Jeannie and Rex graciously agreed.
Here’s one of Jeannie, with a CTO’d flash helping out the golden light of the sun setting.
Before I went into the shoot, I had an idea of a shot I knew I wanted. Rex is quite a character, and he owns an old police cruiser. I wanted a shot of him with the cruiser that made him look like the long arm of the law, and here’s what I ended up with:
Setup shot:
Finally, a couple of simple black-and-white portraits. One flash behind them to act as a rim light (you can really see this on Jeannie’s hair), another in front to light the face.
52 things is now at its official halfway point. Not coincidentally, here’s what my studio looked like at the beginning of this week:
After 26 weeks of weekly projects, my creative space has been in pretty active use! For reference, take a look at what it looked like after a similar cleanup in May 2009. This week’s project, then, was to clean it up, organize, and take a few deep breaths in order to be ready for the second half of 2010 and the next sets of projects!
One place that was especially disorganized was my photo supplies. I have a metal crate that I keep small items in – old film cameras, gels for my flashes, spare parts, etc. This crate had gotten pretty out of control:
My philosophy for cleaning is to first empty everything out:
After sorting, throwing away, organizing, and generally cleaning, here’s what the crate looks like now:
Much better! Here’s a photo partway through the process. The studio desk is mostly cleaned off, but there’s still quite a bit of work to do:
Finally, I finished. There’s still a lot to do (old gear to list on eBay or craigslist, things to donate or get rid of, etc) but it’s much better than it was.
It’s nice to have a clean space to start out the second half of the year in.
This post is set to automatically go live on Friday morning, by which time I will be deep in the woods of Northern Michigan, on a much-anticipated camping expedition. Looking forward to the second half of 2010!
