My Spinning Project

From this:
Beautiful Lincoln roving in natural colours.

To this:
I spun the roving, and Navajo plied it, to keep the colours separate.
It's over to the knitter now. I wonder how it will turn out?

My Fix

Apart from my family, one of the things I miss most about Ireland is Tayto Cheese 'n' Onion Crisps. There is nothing on the market here that even comes close!

I have a (very) few of these precious packs left....

New Toy

My latest acquisition is a Voigtländer Nokton 58mm f/1.4 manual focus lens. I have no idea how this compares to the Nikkor 50mm lenses, but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun playing with it. It should make a pretty good portrait lens for the DX format Nikon D200, with a field of view equivalent to an 86mm lens on a 35m camera.

Yogpot Gels

I have been doing a lot of pictures of Maggie's hand-dyed scarves and hankies for her Etsy store, and needed to be able to have a variety of background colours to (a), relieve monotony, and (b), to best show the colour of the subject. I have two backdrops, one Chromakey Blue, and one grey. These aren't really expensive - a 9x12 backdrop and support set can be got for $73 here on eBay. However, I have neither the money nor space for lots of different backgrounds, so I have been playing with lighting my grey drop with different coloured gels on a strobe, and have been quite pleased with the results.

For my gels, I used the plastic tops of yogurt pots - these are available in a large variety of flavours (I mean colours), are cheap and readily available, and they are considerably more durable than regular gels. They also clip very nicely to the front of my SB-26's (if I have a loose one, or if I need to have a strobe facing downwards, a small bit of Blu-Tac will hold it in place).

The only downside to these is that they don't transmit light as well as gels, so you need more power, but for my purposes, this was never a problem (as you see, I didn't even bother scraping the writing off the lids)

Here are the results - one backdrop, various lighting. And this is before I even start playing with cookies, more than one colour, shooting the strobe through glasses (with or without water), etc, etc, etc. Who needs loads of backdrops?

(If you think that's good, have a look at this!)

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

Cute Kitties

We have been looking after four baby kittens recently - here are pictures of three of them. I'll try to get one of the fourth as soon as I can :)

What's in my Bag

Here's a look in my camera bag, if you're interested. This is how it looks today - tomorrow it might be completely different as I'm continuously tweaking and upgrading what gear I have. There's a labelled copy of this picture on my Flickr page.

(This picture was lit by window light, camera left; filled with my DIY Reflector, camera right).

Serried Schacht Spinners

Four Schacht spinning wheels lined up and ready for action.

Abi Hutchison of High Prairie Fibers invited a group of to visit her beautiful home and studio in eastern Iowa for a "Spinners' Play Day*" yesterday. Abi and her husband, Michael, who runs Iowa Parrot Rescue gave us a really wonderful time. We got to see old friends and new, the beautiful parrots, the new bird house, Abi's fabulous studio with her big drum carder and pin drafting machine, Michael and some of his friends played great music for us, and there was excellent food. A good time was had by all, and I, for one, am looking forward to the next such event!

*OK, there were spinners, knitters, crocheters, weavers, and all manner of fibre artists there.

Jill makes Navajo plying look easy

Michael provides music for us to spin to!