The Flash

 Previously, I mentioned that I got an AK Diffuser.  These things are purportedly made to order, based upon the type of flash unit/camera combo you have.  In my case it was a Canon Speedlite 580EX coupled to a Canon R6 Mark II.  That flash is pretty old and has been discontinued by Canon for some years.  To compound things, the flash was very fussy about what camera settings it would work with.

I opted to get the Godox V860IIIC as a replacement for the Speedlite.  I got mine from B&H Photo for the $229 asking price.  To cover the cost of this extravagance, I sold a bunch of old silver coins from my coin collection for around $320 -- more than enough.  I'm thinking, hell, I'm 72 and I can't take them with me.  In addition, most of those coins were pretty worn and of little or no collector's value.  I was told that even some of the uncirculated coins would be melted down.

So in upgrading my flash unit, I was taking a big chance that my AK Diffuser would work with the new flash.  I had spoken with a customer support representative at B$H, and he told me the Godox was not going to fit the diffuser.  I also tried ChatGPT, and it, too, said it was a "no."  I wanted a third opinion and asked the Google AI for advice.  It asked me to snap a picture of the diffuser, and it said that due to the Velcro attachments, it WAS likely to fit.

Guess what?  When the flash arrived I immediately tried it with the diffuser, and it fit snugly.  I've shot a few things with it, and I discovered that the TTL setting on the flash worked very well.  To increase the exposure a little bit, I could get away with using a lower speed than I usually did.  Speeds in the range of 1/30 and 1/60 per second.  Something that I had read earlier said that slower speeds can work pretty well because the duration of the flash was enough to dampen the effects of camera shake.

In a Pickle

 I've been bitten by the pickling bug, having bought a case of quart Ball jars and a kit consisting of caps with plugs, fermentation locks and glass weights.

My first attempt came to a sad end.  I tried to make sauerkraut in a jar, but I didn't follow any sort of recipe, opting instead to make it the same way my parents did.  Except instead of a big wooden barrel, I used one of those quart Ball jars.  I think I did a poor job of mashing the chopped cabbage down, because I was not able to generate much liquid from the cabbage.  That and the warmth of summer, my cabbage started to mold instead of fermenting.

From there, I tried my hand at pickled cucumbers.  I had very little dill weed, so I tried to compensate with other spices, like mustard seed, coriander seed and garlic.  I found a recipe online that had vinegar, water, salt and not much else.   In retrospect, I wished I has something to make/keep the cucumbers crunchy, but the end result was not too bad.  I'm down to my last pickle now.

Today, I murdered a bag of miniature cucumbers and made some cucumber kimchi using a recipe from this video:   Easy Korean Spicy Cucumber!  I had something much like this at one of the meals at the Black Bear restaurant.  I liked that "kimchi" so much that I committed to making a batch of my own.  I had just a moment ago done some quality control of my batch, and I pronounce it delicious. 

In anticipation of more things to pickle, I've planted a raised bed garden, which circumvents the perpetual problem that I've had with weeds.  What I didn't cover with a raised bed, I covered in plastic sheeting and cardboard in hope of killing off the goat weed that's been plaguing my ability to garden.  I've planted both some pickling and  eating cucumbers, two type of beans (pole and bush), some zucchini, lettuce, beets, tomatoes and broccoli.  Hoping for the best.  So far, I've harvested a couple of stunted tomatoes and some young zucchini.  I'd hate to have to put a price tag on my garden.

Everclear

I screwed up and left this post in draft mode for the past week. 

Mike and I went to the Everclear concert at The Ruby Amphitheater at Hazel Ruby McQuain Park.  The opening band was The Sages.  I had never hear of them before, but the played well to a full crowd.  Everclear, a popular band from the 90s,  played to an SRO audience.   I guess people like them a lot more than Leftover Salmon, which I saw last week.  

I only had a passing familiarity with Everclear's music.  I was in the minority there.   People were singing along to a lot of their songs.

Well, this time I brought my camera and a Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens.   

Here's a good shot of The Sages:

As you can see, it paid to sit higher up and back.  We could actually see the band over the heads of all of the people standing in front of the stage.

Here are a couple of shots of Everclear:

A Visit to the Morgantown Botanical Garden

 As the the title implies, I toured the Morgantown Botanical Garden yesterday afternoon.  I saw this as an opportunity to try out my recent purchase of an AK Diffuser, which provides even lighting for macro photographs.  These are purportedly custom made for specific camera and flash combinations.

Using this diffuser, I took a variety of mushroom pictures in the woods.  Unpracticed as I am with using my ancient Canon Speedlite flash, I still had to resort to cranking the ISO level on my camera, alternating between 1000 and 2000 ISO. I've downloaded the manual for the Speedlite 580 EX, so now I can research how to increase the amount of light being emitted. 

Here's a cute little Yellow American Blusher (Amanita flavorubens): 

 

This is a tiny little Winter Russula (Russula cremoricolor) nestled deeply among the leaf litter:

As you can see, the AK diffuser provided an even lighting for what would normally be a dark, shadowy picture.

Finally, I was able to catch the Great Rhododendron (Charlie Brown), which was blooming in the forest:

If I had any sense at all, I should check out the Deckers Creek trail or the cliff at Coopers Rock State Forest for some more picturesque wide-angle shots.

The Macro has Landed

 Earlier, I had explained how I needed the old Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens to get the Canon 77D back in the game.   The lens has arrived and it seems to be working fine.

Today's Macro Monday theme on Flickr was "sports," bearing in mind that the representation of sport had to fall with a three-inch diameter.  My choice for that macro was to shoot the hub and spokes of my bicycle.  To try out the new/old lens, I set up a 20-shot stack.  From that, I picked alternating shots and stacked them that way.   This save a lot of processing time, especially since my laptop storage is teetering on "full."  Not owning any specialized photo stacking software, I performed that job in PhotoShop.  I left some blurry areas amongst where some of the spokes crossed over.  I laboriously went in and used the clone stamp and heal tool to fill in the blurred spaces.

Here's the final product:

The stacking really helped to bring out the depth of this picture.  You would have to know what to look for to even suspect that this picture had been edited.  In my defense, I wasn't putting in something that wasn't there, I was restoring some tiny blurry areas that PhotoShop had created when it processed that stack.

Repurchasing an Old Lens

 Don't get me wrong.  I'm very happy with my latest camera, a Canon R6 Mark II.  But I'm still hanging on to my 77D, an APS-C Canon from 2017.  But in the process of moving to the mirrorless world, I had sold off some of my older lenses, one of which was the Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM.  I now regret parting with that lens.  I miss having a macro lens on the 77D and I can foresee times when I would use that camera to supplement my macro photography.

Alas, the EF-S 60mm is no long in production.  Canon stopped producing it and decided to emphasize their newer R-series lenses for mirrorless cameras.  The lenses are still available on the used market, however.  Prices are said to range between $275 and $410.  I searched eBay and found that most lenes were close to $300 and well beyond.

I broke down and bought a lens from ProPhoto Supply for $250, including shipping.  It's on its way now.

Crazy Tuesday

 Another Flickr group that I participate in is called "Crazy Tuesday."  It is a moderated theme-based group, where the subject matter changes from week to week according to a chosen theme.   This week's theme for instance is "stamps."  

Yesterday, I worked on a sheet of Ukrainian wildflower stamps from the year 2000.  Here's what I finally came up with:

I was pretty happy with this, but then I thought that it seemed silly to have just a picture of stamps.  I could have easily just done it with a scanner.  It needed a little something else.   Today, I worked on reshooting these stamps to include some flower in the margin.  Just something to emphasize that the stamps weren't merely scanned.

At first, I used my go-to lens:  a Canon RF100mm F2.8 L MACRO IS USM lens mounted on a tripod.  Even with Adobe Lightroom, however, my image was a little skewed.  I reshot once more, this time using a Canon RF24mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM lens.  The wide angle gave me a lot of extra room around the subject, so that any distortion was away from the center of my subject.

I was careful to place the flowers in such a way that any shadow they cast would be towards the lower-right.  My natural light source was coming from the top.  Exposure was .3 seconds at f/8 and 200 ISO.  This was actually created from three bracketed shots and processed as an HDR -- High Dynamic Range -- which captures a much wider range of light and shadow.

Somehow, I suspect that I may encounter some resistance from the group moderator, as she had said this:

Your photo must unambigoulsy show the THEME OBJECT which FILLS THE FRAME (without a big negative space) and the THEME must be RECOGNIZABLE (without having to say in the description “it is this or that”. As our group’s name is CRAZY TUESDAY – some craziness is very welcome but WITHIN the implemented group rules/requirements. Sometimes that is more or less possible – depending on the theme.

I've run afoul of group rules before that has resulted in my picture being removed.  I'm going to state my case in the photo description, arguing that I didn't want to post something that looks like a scanned image.  We shall see.

About this stamp sheet

The "Flowers of Ukraine" (also known as Plant World Flowers) stamps, issued in October 2000, are a beloved series of 10 miniature stamps designed by artist Kateryna Shtanko. This iconic wildflower souvenir sheet placed 3rd in the seventh World Cup of the stamp held by Timropresse.