The Munchkin's Notebook

Rubber Duck in Balloon Never start a conversation with your husband with the sentence, “Tomorrow can you please lube up some rubber ducks for me and put them in balloons?” He will give you a very strange look then ask why. To which my response was, “so I can fill the balloons with water then drop them in the bathtub and take pictures of the resulting splash.”   Initial Burst (no rubber duck) I took my lesson learned from the last I did the rubber duck drop photos and improved upon it. This time placed a splash screen in the bathroom to collect and drain the water back into the bathtub.  The splash screen was a clear shower curtain hung slightly below the camera and a couple inches out from the bathtub with the bottom of the shower curtain in the bathtub.  This work very well. There was no big mess in the bathroom and I did not have to wear a bathing suit since it contained all the water.  For this shoot the camera was mounted on a tripod looking down...

The set up What does one do with water balloons, rubber ducks and lubricant? In my case you attempt to make photographic art .  I set up Plexiglas table in my bathtub (the bathroom works great when you don’t have a studio) and dropped water balloons onto it.  The rig consisted of two tripod stands, wood platforms, a piece of Plexiglas attached between the two, tin foil to act as a reflector and white back drop taped to the wall.  To guarantee the balloons would break a thumb tack was taped to the Plexiglas. The camera was pre-focused and set to use burst mode. I used an f/7.5 aperture, 1/650s shutter, and an ISO of 800 with an external flash. I tried using a timer but that didn't work well, the best  results I got were utilizing a shutter release. I hit and held the shutter when I released the balloon and released once the balloon hit.  I got some “ok” shots but I need to refine the setup further.  I used water balloons with and without colored water a...

On Tuesday, July 30, 2013 SmugMug change the underlying code that supports the site. This change included an updated interface, look and feel to all the webpages they support. The change updated the site pages to make them look sleeker and modern similar to what Flicker and 500px did, but way better. (I really blame Apple for this sleek and modern look everyone is going too.) Thankfully they just didn’t do a mass change overnight to everyone’s photo site but gave people time to get used to the changes and update their sites accordingly.  Since Wednesday I have been working with the new interface and bring my site up to date to make it look sleek and modern. It has the same basic feel as the old site it just looks new and shiny.  Today was big unveil day for my site.  It still may need some minor tweaks but it looks good and does what I want for the most part.  So please take a look at the new site (same web address http://munchkinphotos.smugmug.com/ ) and let m...