I have a question for all material scientists & plastic experts.  I have an Apple wireless keyboard and a near-UV LED flashlight.   As one would expect, many things fluoresce:  tee shirts, white paper, etc.  What is odd, is that only some of the keys on my keyboard do this.  I would expect this to be [...]

I’ve been experimenting with ways to take the best time lapse using the Canon 5d Mark II and I’ve come up with two distinct methods that are worth sharing.  The first method involves shooting normal video and speeding it up while the second involves a more traditional approach of shooting frames and combining them to [...]

On a whim today, we went to the world’s larges ball of twine wound by a single person.  This monstrosity is located in Darwin Minnesota is is clearly the center of this god awful little town. The inspiration for this odyssey was Sam and Max Hit the Road.

My 500 GB iMac SATA hard drive died the other day.  After replacing it, I wanted to have a little fun before discarding the drive.  See the disassembly photos after the jump.

This is a video I made while out taking photos this evening.  The original duration was about 14 minutes and was sped up by 3,000% to a final duration of just under 30 seconds.  It was filmed with my canon 5D Mark II and Sigma 1.4 50mm and post processing was done in Adobe Premiere [...]

Good news!  It looks like Canon is adding 24P video to the 5d Mark II.  Even more exciting, in my opinion, is that the audio auto gain control is being modified so users can disable this feature or manually set the gain.  If you’ve ever recorded audio on this camera, you will appreciate this feature.  [...]

This video was shot between 10:30PM and 1:30AM starting on 3/3/2010 from the Minneapolis Grain Exchanging looking east. Shots were taken at 10 second intervals and the final playback speed is 30fps.  A Sigma 50mm 1:1.4 was used at about f/2.8 allowing for 1/40th second exposures.  The frames were rendered in to a high quality [...]

I love taking photographs at night in the winter. I don’t the the process as much as the results. The cold dry air yields incredibly sharp results and when it is really cold out, the water vapor form building leaves a thick lingering streak in the sky. The video below was filmed on January 3rd [...]

Last night I was experimenting with an old laptop hard drive.  I used a USB to PATA hard drive adapter to recover old data off of a 2.5 inch 20GB Toshiba hard drive.  When I was done, I intended to destroy the drive to prevent recovery.  After a few seconds – I had a better [...]

I’ve been experimenting with a cheap macro contraption.  Generally, a dedicated macro lens works best.  Next up is a screw-on filter style.  After that is mounting two lenses end-to-end and lastly is my solution: just putting the lens on backwards.  A mounted my Canon 35-80 1:4 on backwards and it worked…shockingly.  The image is nearly [...]