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The DPS assigment this week is horizontal lines, and I may yet attempt something for that, but next week’s assignment is going to be vertical lines, which I have chosen to address first.

I have been tinkering in my “lab” with a new project I am working on, involving an Igus slider driven by a stepper motor for use in creating smooth camera panning, for both regular video and time lapse photography. I’ll have more to say on that later as I continue to develop the electronics and control software (I have outsourced the mechanical design), and especially once I have some demo video.

But in the meantime, I have a table full of electronic components, so I grew a component garden, which inevitably needed weeding.

The background is a printed circuit board I designed in grad school as part of my PhD years ago. As you can see, this particular copy is unpopulated. Keeping the light on it minimal, I thought it made a nice background. Plain black or white was too boring, whereas the circuit board adds a little interest and fits the theme without overpowering the main image. And my wife said hanging on to that old junk was pointless!

I tried both uniform and mixed components, different kinds of flowers, pliers in back and in front, allowing the component tops to be seen or not, and a couple of different light arrangements. In the end, given that I want to emphasize the vertical lines, I think I am going to submit the one entitled “Dandelion” where the pliers are behind, the tops are not visible, and the row of components is composed uniformly of resistors with their markings all facing the same way.

Let me know what you think.

My brother Will over at Lettereye Media wanted a shot or two of himself for his personal profile, so we spent a few minutes this afternoon shooting a couple different setups. Will is a web designer who does a great job helping other people put their best face forward through their web sites. He understands how, in a visual medium like the web, the quality of your images makes all the difference in coming across as professional and put together.

Will also happens to be a serious musician, so sitting him at the piano was a natural fit. We later wandered outside and got a few straight up head shots. Some of the better results are below.

This week’s DPS assignment is Framing: building a frame into the image.

It occurred to me that our neighborhood school yard has a little plastic house built into the Kindergarten playground equipment, complete with windows, so I took the kids out to see what we could do. I also took my SB-600 flash unit, with the goal of trying to create decent lighting despite the harsh mid-day sun.

I set the tripod low, to be on a level with the play area equipment, attached my 14-24mm at f/8, and then walked around with the flash and the camera remote, keeping the camera more or less in one place but experimenting with the light position. Meanwhile, the kids came up with every which way they could be in, or spilling out of, the window. We had a great deal of fun as the kids were eager to try all sorts of things.

In the end, the sun backlit the kids, while the flash provided nice fill in most cases. As for what to submit to the weekly assignment, I am leaning toward one of the ones where Megan is upside down.

Every spring, as part of a science lesson, the kindergarten class in my kids’ school raises chicks and ducks. They obtain eggs from a local farm, incubate them in the classroom for several weeks, talking about what is going on inside the eggs, and keep their fingers crossed that a fair number successfully hatch.

Assuming a good crop, the birds then spend the next few weeks living in the classroom by the day, gawked at and petted by small children as they rapidly grow, and at some or other student’s home by night, according to which parents feel up to volunteering for bird sitting duty. Eventually, the birds are returned to the farm. What happens to them next, we are afraid to ask.

Having experienced this once with my son several years ago, now that my daughter’s turn rolled around, we were smart enough to volunteer early, when the birds are still relatively small. As they get bigger, so does the mess they make.

So we ended up with a group of 3 ducks over Memorial Day weekend, about 3 days old at the start: Puddle, Squeaky, and Fluffy. There were supposed to be four in this group, but Cutie was the runt of the lot, and did not make it to the weekend. A small life lesson for the kids, I guess.

Anyway, I took the opportunity to make some photographs as they taught themselves to swim in our old kiddie pool. The pool is falling apart and too small for the kids now, but the ducks did not need more than a sliver of water anyway.

If you notice a strange coloration on the top of their heads, it’s because each was marked for easy identification. Although, I have to say, by the end of the weekend, after watching them closely for a while, we could tell them apart as much by their behavior as anything. They did each have their own little personality.