Just a short piece today.. I found an awesome short video that reminds us of the important things. Enjoy!
Image via Wikipedia
Do you remember the view master with the wheel of pictures? You know the ones, pictures of national monuments, theme parks, cartoons and the like. You would insert the wheel of pictures, hold it up to the light and, klunk, wheel rotates, klunk, wheel rotates and on and on.
You can still buy one of these machines today and look at Hot Wheels or any of the old wheels so long as you have a bright light handy.
So why am I bringing this up? Because I was trying to work out in my head the other day how to show off some pictures from my 4th of July party and I was inspired to make and fake a View Master picture wheel as a prop of sorts.
A bit of googling and I found the perfect template created by ScrappinCop in the form of a Photoshop PSD file ready to go. So one template download later and we are off and running.
I did make each image a clipping mask to ease the adjustments and cropping. I used the transform tool to resize images to the dinky openings. And I make each “image” a smart object so I can go back and swap out the image pretty easily.
After I put my images in the openings, I added a used paper texture to the wheel so it had the used and aged look to it.I selected all the openings and outside edge and added a brownish stroke of 1 pixel to set it off against whatever background I have on.
Here is what I ended up with as my vintage prop to show off my images in a unique way. Go ahead and give it a try.. it was a lot of fun to do and everyone liked the results as a fun way to show off a collection of images.
Related articles
- Vintage View-Master: Germany (Nations of the World series), reel 3 (grayflannelsuit.net)
I saw a very interesting blog posting on how to shoot flowers using a light box. I took a different approach since I did not want to build a cardboard box so anything else. I took my large softbox and flipped it upside down. I could do this because I use C stands with boom arms and it becomes very easy to change the orientation of a modifier. I just made sure that the legs were in the right position to take up the low weight and added a few sand bags for good measure.
I then put a piece of clear plexiglass on top of the softbox or now light table and put my subject on top of that. I have a Photogenics 1250 strobe but now I would pull it and put in the 600 instead. The 1250 is too strong even turned down as low as it can go. I plan to try it with white plexiglass whereas I’m shooting with clear right now. The white should be worth a couple of stops.
I had a second mini softbox using an SB800 in SU mode on a monopod that I held over the subject. I manually set the SB800 to something around 1/8 power and about 3 feet high. I tried straight on, sideways and all kinds of angles. The best results seemed to be feathering the small soft box slightly to pick up some edge shadows.
I used a pair of Atlas pocket wizard clones on this shoot only because they were handy and my real PWs were packed away. I shot with:
- Nikon D300
- 50mm 1.4 at F16
- ISO 100
- Shutter at 1/250
Next time I will put the small light box on a second C stand instead of holding it. That was just too much trouble but I was in a real hurry to try this and get back to the family outside. The ladder was the only way I could get enough hight to shoot down on my subject, anywhere else and I was shooting across it and it did not work nearly as well.
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- Cream-of-the-crop DIY Softbox Designs (makezine.com)
- DIY Photography Softbox from a Styrofoam Cooler [Video] (lifehacker.com)
- DIY lightbox repurposes useless scanner (hackaday.com)
- DIY softboxes light your photos on the cheap (hackaday.com)
