Blog entries from September, 2026

When I posted about looking through my list and picking lightbulb on a tablet as the next thing to work on and important qualifier was having all the parts. I have actually gone through the entire list of ideas and created a list of things that I need to get before I could start.

I did try oil and water with a clear baking dish balanced on top of some small boxes, but this was both too precarious and I quickly found that I needed a better container that had less imperfections and/or lettering.

To have a better platform I wanted a piece of glass, but where is a convenient place to get a small piece of tempered glass? A glass shelf and there is an IKEA not that far away where I picked up an UTRUSTA shelf.

For the container I had gotten some interesting results from a round Pyrex jug, but I could tell that for the nice smooth results I needed something larger and with square sides. I normally don’t like using Amazon, but that was where I found some acrylic trays, these came in a number of sizes and are advertised as for organising makeup in a drawer.

This was my final setup:

From the bottom up we have:

• the grey surface of my desk
• coloured objects, in this case a set of pencils
• glass shelf raised up 13cm (four soft drink cans)
• acrylic tray on the shelf (about half full of water)
• flash (configured as a remote with ettl) firing down through the shelf
• above the whole lot pointing directly down is my camera with macro lens, as close as possible to minimum focus distance
• to the right is my desktop computer, I was shooting tethered over USB

Initially I tried using my tablet as the source of coloured/patterned light, but it just wasn’t bright enough. I had to raise the ISO much higher than I wanted, a larger tablet might give better results. I then tried a small continuous LED light but that also didn’t give enough light. The flash is what allowed me to keep the camera at ISO 100.

Over the course of three sessions I took well over two thousand images, after an initial purge that is down to just under a thousand, from that I have a selection of thirty two in a Flickr album: Oil and water

The technique I was using at the end was:

• Start with everything completely clean, there should be no oil reside anywhere
• Slowly pour water into the tray, don’t want any air bubbles
• Carefully add a few drops of oil under where the camera is shooting
• Focus on the drops, live view from my desktop PC made this easier to see
• The drops will slowly drift around, maybe add a couple more, but mostly wait
• Underneath the shelf add/remove/move the coloured objects
• Periodically take photos, move the flash or objects around

As the oil drops are moving slowly you get more variance from shifting around the objects under the shelf. The last dozen or so images in my album are the same drops but with different objects, cropping and rotation, eg these:

The mono one is just the grey desk surface, the red one is the shiny back cover of the pencil box, the blue/orange/grey is overlappting tissue paper and the more striped one is the pencils.

One disadvantage of this technique is that as soon as dust starts to settle on the water or you have added too much oil your must reset. Empty the tray and thoroughly clean it, then fill it back up with clean water.

Another disadvantage of this technique is that very quickly after the drops touch will they combine, which you can catch:

To avoid both of these issues you can add a drop of dishwashing liquid which will lower the surface tension, clearing away the dust (as is seen in the Pepper and Water Science Trick – YouTube) and will also make the oil drops stay separate.

You can them get the clusters of small drops, but I didn’t like that you also have a dark ring around each drop:

Stirring up the oil and water can introduce air bubbles, and in a deeper container can give interesting effects with large globs of oil on the surface and tiny bubbles and drops below:

Post processing these images can be tedious, no matter how clean you have it, there was always specs or small drops that I didn’t want. For the ones where I wanted it smooth all over, I used the spot removal tool over everything. For others where there was a lot of activity I would spot remove within the large drops, but then leave the background mostly untouched.

Videos I found useful for this technique:

• How to Create Colorful Artistic Images Using Oil and Water
• Macro at home idea: Easy, abstract oil on water tutorial – YouTube
• My FAVOURITE Macro at Home Idea (Easy tutorial with lighting, settings) – YouTube
• Oil & Water Photography Tutorial – Step by step for a fun bubble shoot at home! – YouTube
• Oil and Water Macro Photography – YouTube
• OIL AND WATER PHOTOGRAPHY – YouTube
• OIL IN WATER – Photography Tutorial 2020 – Step by step to the perfect image – YouTube
• Space Art macro photography using water and oil – YouTube

While building and initial playing around with my DIY pixelstick was fun, I was stalled a bit because the next step was to go out and try it, but I needed to work out some locations and find some other people to assist. So I looked through my list and picked one that didn’t need much setup and I already had all the parts: clear object on tablet.

I had seen this around with people using clear plastic or glass objects lit from below by an image on a tablet. I don’t have any glass figures or ornaments, but many people were using lightbulbs, so last time I was at Bunnings I picked up a globe that I thought would be suitable.

The bulb had to be clear, it is a smaller size so there is less empty space within, the screw base was more interesting than a bayonet base, and I liked the long thin LED elements:

To illuminate the bulb I needed some colourful patterns. The guides I had seen online suggested stock images or free patterns, but I decided to use my own images. I found about 20 images I thought would be suitable, ones with lines or shapes, and strong patterns or bold colours, and started to experiment.

The setup is fairly simple, a small table with black cloth behind, my 8″ tablet with the bulb on top, camera on tripod in front:

The tablet is on another small box to raise it up a bit so the camera was at a more comfortable height, but that folded piece of white paper? That is there to bounce a bit of light back onto just the top of the screw threads, to complete their shape.

My first session of experimenting gave promising results. I had the table in different orientations, I changed the angle of the camera to the tablet, I rotated the bulb on the tablet, I zoomed in and out of the image to change its position in the bulb to get different effects.

In that behind the scenes shot above I was still using my regular 24-105 lens, but I later switched to my 100mm macro lens which gave a clearer result that was easier to focus. The final images were taken at f/16 ISO100 for (most at) 10 seconds, so I am glad I picked up a bluetooth remote so I could move away from the setup during the exposure?

Why stay away? The lightbulb is glass and metal sitting on the glass front of the tablet, this is very slippery and any slight movement from the floor would cause the bulb to shift. Initially I had a small piece of blutack behind the threads, but you could see that in the final shot, so I 3d printed a little black arm that came out from behind the tablet and stuck to the back of the threads with blutack, even then the bulb would slide around a little bit.

All of this led to the second session where I knew the setup that I wanted so I worked my way through all of my chosen images on the tablet. Once I had those images in Lightroom I selected the best dozen and then got to work tweaking their sliders (all of them got a lot of clarity) and a decent amount of spot removal

Those dozen images are in my Lightbulb on a tablet album. The description of each image has a link to the image that was being displayed on the tablet. I couldn’t decide between two images that used Sockets, so I included them both.

This also means that this item is completed, I have crossed it off the list.

Some videos I found useful for this were:

• What’s the secret to Perfect Lightbulb Reflection Photos? – YouTube
• Lightbulb on tablet: Creative photography ideas for fun projects to try at home! – YouTube
• Lighting glass abstract photography – YouTube
• Glass Reflection Tablet Photography Tutorial – YouTube

The first item I decided to cross off my list was light painting with a pixelstick. This is one of the more ambitious projects as it first requires me to build the stick, but that is appealing as it is just more problems to solve, and if all I got done was the pixelstick, that could be my entire portfolio.

I have taken photos of a pixelstick before, back in 2015 when on a photo walk one of the other people had one, so along with photos of fire I have these:

 

Some years ago I purchased some RGB strips to make my own pixelsteick, but then that project never went anywhere, so the first step was to find the parts I already had. Once found I hooked the strip up to a D1 mini (my arduino of choice) and loaded up a example sketch for the Adafruit NeoPixel library:

I now returned to research mode and repeated by search for DIY pixelstick projects, I found a few different ones, I think I ended up using something (even if just tips) from all of them:

• DIY Pixelstick : 6 Steps (with Pictures) – Instructables
• DIY Pixelstick with image processing – YouTube
• LucasBerbesson/pixelstick: How to make a light wand · GitHub
• How to Build a DIY ‘Pixelstick’ for About $22 | PetaPixel
• Lighty – a pixelstick on the cheap | Dirk Essl
• Pixel Stick – WiFi controlled light wand using Arduino and WS2812 LED – Gadgetronicx
• Pixelstick Alternative! Budget Lightpainting : 6 Steps – Instructables

I also learned more about the WLED project and while it didn’t appear to be useful for the light painting of specific images, it did look like an easy way to get random patterns. So now I had two parallel paths, one to paint predetermined images and another to generate random patterns.

The loose LED strip needed to be attached to something and also needed to be portable, this was achieved using cable ties, a garden stake and a USB battery bank:

I set my camera up on a tripod in my lounge room, guessed at some settings, and was able to capture the proof of concept:

This was going to work so I visited Bunnings for some parts and ordered others oneline. While I waited for delivery I also tinkered with the software side, I ended up using Lighty as the starting point, but refactored it to both learn how it worked and to be used with my choice of hardware.

Parts that I was waiting on included:

• different styles of LED channel and different diffusers for those channels
• inline USB power switch
• newer smaller USB battery bank
• extra 3 Pin JST SM Male And Female Connectors
• more LED strips but just the bare strip (not in the waterproof casing like the one I had)

I also realised I could order an off the shelf small ESP32 based WLED controller, which would be nice for the WLED version of the stick.

To hold different components securely together, I 3d printed some brackets, giving me my version 1:

This version is robust enough that I could then walk back and forth across my lounge room, switching the next WLED effect each time to produce my own catalog of the effects:

From these I selected a few that I liked as patterns, then experimented with using those while waving the stick around in front of the camera:

From these experiments a selection of thirty are in this Flickr album: DIY Pixelstick – WLED based patterns

Some of these abstract shapes were made with the bare LEDs, while others had a frosted diffuser. In this context I prefer the sharp lines made by the LEDs, but when the lighting is just an effect around another subject the frosted effect might be better, that is also what the commercial and other diy versions are doing.

Improvements I have planned for this version are:

• smaller strip of wood, or maybe aluminum channel (once final it will be painted black)
• handles of some form, but don’t know what shape or position yet
• maybe a different shaped battery, eg something long and round, such as would take 16650 li-ion cells

On the software side this will use WLED, but I will configure it so the single button on the controller can be used for certain actions, eg single press to turn on or off, double press to cycle through presets.

The other version of the stick (using preloaded images) is also coming along. I am keeping this self-contained with and SD card reader, small screen and input buttons. The current version looks like this:

And is able to produce these:

For now I have put this on hold until I work out some suitable locations to try it out.

For a long time I have had a list of photo ideas written down in a notebook. Many of them have come and gone as fads/trends on social media and as they can also mostly be done at home with minimal equipment a number of the peaked during lockdowns.

I have done a couple of them before, so those I want to revisit, and the others I have wanted to try for the first time.

The list:

• sound triggered flash (balloons, party poppers, etc)
• water drop collisions
• objects (fruit, toys) into water
• paint/dye into water
• smoke
• soap bubbles
• oil and water (lit underneath)
• polarizer sheet and glass/plastic objects
• clear object on tablet
• glass orb/lensball
• paint on speaker
• macro with household objects (forks/spoons, utensils, pencils, folded paper, etc)
• light painting with pixelstick
• fire/poi spinning
• flat lay (objects)
• flat lay backlit (sliced fruit)
• suspended objects (cut up fruit)
• no lens refraction
• strobist light box
• water droplets

(if an item is a link, then I have a followup where I have done that one)

At the camera club we have a portfolio group and I decided to do a portfolio this year, but what would the subject or theme of my portfolio be? My ambitious idea is make this list the theme, work though as many items as a possible showing the result and behind the scenes. My fallback idea is to take one item from the list and focus on that…

It has been a few years since I last put together unofficial LEGO sets using MOC instructions from Rebrickable and ordering parts from BrickLink. Today is when I clicked publish on one of my own designs.

Once of the core podcasts that I listen to is Do Go On, a fact based comedy podcast hosted by these three Melbourne comedians:

I don’t recall exactly when I first saw it, but there was LEGO set for creating a custom BrickHeadz figure of yourself. The marketing images for that set include a figure that is a spot on Matt Stewart, and another that is close to Jess Perkins:

There was no immediate example that was close to Dave Warneke, but to be honest he is a white guy that records a podcast, so how hard could he be to represent?

I sat on this idea for a while, until a few months ago I decided to finish off some incomplete MOCs. If I was going to be ordering pieces, I might as well order more.

I didn’t go straight to building, first I downloaded the instructions for the Go Brick Me set, this is broken up into the variety of hats, hair, facial features, clothing and other choices. After a few hours of tinkering in Studio I had a design I was happy with:

I added these parts to my orders, waited for them to arrive and then put them together:

More photos can be found at Do Go On as LEGO BrickHeadz on Flickr.

But what now? How should I get these to the podcast? I have seen them at a number of live podcasts in Melbourne (and in Koh Samui back in 2019) but I knew that their next Melbourne live shows wouldn’t be until October, which I would not be able to make it to. I could post it to them, but then I wouldn’t be able to see their reaction.

For Do Go On I am on the Patreon tier where you can submit a “Fact, Quote or Question” that they will read out at the end of the podcast. I have submitted a number of these before and I could do so again, making sure that the package had instructions to wait for the FQQ and the FQQ opening with a note to ensure they had the package.

This worked as today (episode 568, skip to around 2:26:00) the package was opened. In the video version of the episode the reaction from Jess is exactly what I was after.

I have now shared this information and photos with the other Patreons, and also hit publish on the design file I had uploaded to BrickLink.

I have written before how my computer mouse of choice has been the Microsoft IntelliMouse Opitcal 1.1A, so much so that I have a total of seven of these mice, all of which have been repaired over the years. However late last year I discovered a new problem in that the rubbery coating on the mouse wheels is starting to deteriorate. I tried to order some replacements, but they were not good enough.

My search for a replacement has meant that for the last couple of months I have had three mice connected:

I wanted to keep the cost low which meant excluding wireless options, but when you get into it there are not that many wired options. I also wanted a simple black mouse without flashy RGB effects.

My first candidate was the base model Razer Cobra which was working well, however was noticeably smaller than the IntelliMouse which I kept switching back to.

My second candiate was the Cooler Master MM310. This is closer in size to the Intellimouse and I found that I wasn’t switching back.

Today, after three months of only using the MM310, I gave my desk a tidy and kept only the MM310 connected. I also placed an order for another one, so I would have a spare.