Supposin’ I should mention:
Mark your calendars! The next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 28th. Tho X. Bui will give an introduction to magnetics and magnetic material, and Bobby Metz will present his homebrew photography ball head. See you there!
Details:
Phoenix DIY Meeting 9
Tuesday, October 28th @7PM
North Tempe Community Centerhttp://www.tempe.gov/northtempe/
What could be better than having a little instrument with you all the time, hidden in your hat?
Insiders Tip: Don’t take this to the airport.
The inspiration for this project came while on the long road trip to Austin last weekend, and I finally had some time to make it. The prototype is a bit rough, but I think it gets the point across well enough. Walkthrough of the project and schematic after the break.
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Note: October was a horrible choice for a thing-a-day project, what with the Maker Faire and all. I’ll get 31 projects in by re-starting today.
Sick of getting an ugly, harsh light when you take pictures using a flash? Tired of relying on finding a white ceiling to use for bounce flash? Then you need a diffuser for your flash! I followed these nice directions from Chuck Gardner to work with my external flash, but you can find similar projects that work quite nicely with your built-in flash as well.
Why is this useful? The flash is a very small light, so it comes off as a hard light source when mounted to the top of a camera. By bouncing the light off of a larger diffuser, it effectively becomes a bigger and less directional light source, which softens shadows and evens out the lighting from the flash. At least, that is how I understand it. Tutorial after the break.
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Note: I punched the button to enable a new permalinks structure. This means that my articles can be accessed by their month and title instead of the cryptic ?p= default setup. As far as I can tell, that original version should still work, but if you notice any problems with links to my site then please let me know!
We had a great time at Maker Faire in Austin! I got lots of great feedback about the harp and am anxious to try out some of the suggestions. Thanks to Matt, Joe and everyone from The Robot Group for helping out! I’m recovering from our drive back to Phoenix, and will have more information about the harp here shortly. In the meantime, here are some pictures that I got at the event:
(click the picture to view the gallery)
I remember reading in some book about how to make a giant kaleidoscope out of cardboard and tinfoil, but since mirrors are pretty cheap, I just used those instead. Now I really want to watch some Busby Berkeley films…
I’m still working on the second part of the intervalometer (translation: putting it off until I figure out a more intelligent way to make the menus), but here is a video I made to prove that the concept works:
Note: The quality is pretty poor on the youtube version; I recommend the higher resolution version.
