Acros, you don’t belong on facebook. How dare you assume that I waste time at work on my computer surfing facebook. However, I was just informed that we once again have money, so I think I might order some LDA and N-Boc-tryptophan-OMe from you. And DMF. Someone keeps breaking the bulb on our solvent system.
Rant warning. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear me bitch.
The namesake for my blog title is the error message that I get to read daily on our POS printer. You can read about my woes here. In keeping with the theme of writing about all things that will delay my graduation date, I will add to the list.
(1) Put the damn syringe pump back when you are done. Back does not mean the back of your hood. More importantly, why the hell do you need a syringe pump to dispense reagent from a 10 mL syringe at 88 mL/hr? Stand there and push the plunger yourself, because I’m pretty sure that a 6.8 minute addition is approximately equal to the amount of time it took you to find, program, and start the pump in the first place.
(2) How hard is it to order toner? Does it not make sense to have a new cartridge for the printer on hand should one run out, especially when the toner low light has been flashing for a month?
(3) Learn how to operate the solvent system. Last I checked, opening the valve at the bottom when the bulb is under vacuum is probably just going to suck air into the bulb, negating the entire purpose of a solvent system in the first place.
(4) Do 5 gallons of acetone really weight that much?
(5) "Let’s put the metal to the pedal and get roaring here." And by "GET TO WORK!" you mean, take Friday off to go climbing? Done.
Whew. I’m done. On to another topic…
Now that I have more than one notebook, they need to be labeled. I need to think of something clever to write on the spine, given that "Big Book of Lies" and "Headaches" are already taken. Suggestions? On that note, I’m excited to have hundreds of pages of virgin white space to litter with frustration, bad chemistry, profanity, and acronyms like "WTF! N/R? S.M.! Argh."
Jeff and I shot a wedding in Johnstown last weekend. My favorite shots below.
I pimped out a couple of the gear pictures that I took on Sunday. Did I mention that Photoshop is awesome?
In my last post I talked about an alternative to HDR that I discovered. I dug up a couple old photos to try it out, and used some flashy gif animations to prove my point.
The first photo is a river in RMNP at sunset. In the original below (with some exposure, shadow, and contrast correction), the sky looks awesome, but the foreground is too dark. You can tell there are mountains there, but not much else.
I followed the steps outlined in yesterday’s post and came up with this:
I was able to keep the sky dark, lighten up the mountains, bring out the valley, and darken some of the highlights in the water. It took me less than 5 minutes, and the results are better than Photoshop’s HDR script could do.
For the next example, I found a picture of a climber on top of the Church of the Lost and Found boulder in Sherwin Plateau. It was really sunny, so the shadow’s on his face are harsh, and his jacket lacks any detail in the shadows. Boosting the exposure kills the blue sky and the mountains in the background. The original, with my usual minor edits:
After applying my new trick…
and zoomed in for better detail…
Not perfect, but I think it is an improvement. It almost looks like I was using a fill flash from climber’s left. Anyway, I’m adding this to my arsenal.
I’m adding another blog to my roll. Drew Gardner (UK Photographer) gave me an idea that is so utterly simple that it has me wondering "Why didn’t I think of that?" Simple. Brilliant. Alternative to HDR.
High dynamic range imaging (HDR) has been around for a while. Film and digital sensors are incapable of capturing detail in every tonal range of a scene. Imagine you are taking a photo of a sunrise over a lake high in the mountains. As the sun rises, it casts light in the sky and on the peaks of the mountain. The lake reflects some of that light. The foreground (the surrounding forest) is still dark. If you meter for the lit mountain peaks, no detail will be captured in the foreground and the trees will just be dark shadows. Alternatively, correctly metering on the dark trees will blow out the sky and the mountains, and the warm tones cast by the rising sun will be lost, defeating the entire purpose of waking up early for sunrise. Good example:
There are a few solutions. The first would be to use a gradient filter on the lens that darkens half of the frame. Spin the dark half to cover the sky and mountains, and the light half over the trees. You can get a couple stops of exposure out of the trees while keeping the sky dramatic. I don’t own such a filter, so the only option for me is to set my camera on a tripod and take several photos, one exposed for the mountains, the other for the trees and the third somewhere in between. I can open all three in Photoshop, merge them into an HDR image, and have the magical mathematical formulas even out the image so that everything is correctly exposed. The video below shows a before and after shot:
My main beef with HDR is that the images come out looking fake. It doesn’t replicate the image that the human eye processes at the original scene, but artificially boosts levels to give the next best representation. More importantly (for me), this can’t be used for action shots. Since multiple frames have to be captured, the scene can’t change in any way. The clouds can’t even move. Anyway, on to Drew’s idea.
He picks one frame that he likes from a sequence of action shots and creates 2 duplicates. To one, he boosts the exposure. To the other, he drops the exposure. The overexposed image is added as a layer below the original. Using the eraser tool with a suitable opacity setting, he erases dark areas on the original to reveal some of the more detailed exposure beneath. He repeats this with the underexposed image, erasing the hot spots on the picture. The results are believable. While my mind is telling me that some of his shots aren’t photographically possible, my eye doesn’t think "that looks fake." It really reminds me of my days in the darkroom, burning and dodging areas of the negative as I exposed it to the paper. Simple. Effective. Check out his post on the subject, with samples.
As I find time, I’m going to dig up some of my photos to try this on. Keep your eye out for the results.
I’ve had a few google hits for my Alien Bee Power Pack post from people searching for electrical schemes. Since I created a scheme before ordering the parts, I figured I’d post it for anyone trying to build their own. Keep in mind, I don’t remember the official electrical symbols, and I created this figure in ChemDraw.
I used a 12v 10Ah NiMH battery with this smart charger, a 180W pure sine wave inverter, and Anderson connectors and fuse holders.
It works great and fits in my small camera case. I’ve powered anything from my Alien Bee B800 to a lamp with a 100W bulb. Battery life has been great. My only complaint is the long (overnight) charge time for the battery. Leave a comment if you have any questions about the setup. More details can be found on Tim Kemple’s blog. If you aren’t concerned about weight, an alternative is the stock Vagabond II system from Paul C. Buff, Inc. I obviously prefer my pack, as it weighs far less than the Vagabond’s 18.6 lbs and is considerably smaller. I also don’t need a special accessory to recharge the battery pack in my car.
Jeff took a shot of the Alien Bee and battery pack in action. It is perched to my right next to the carrying case for the flash head. Things need to dry up so I can try this out at a bouldering session…
It’s a wet and dreary Easter Sunday and all of the climbing gyms are closed. With nowhere to climb, I resorted to taking picture of gear instead. This was my first chance to use the Alien Bee with my "macro studio". I love it. My favorites below.
The above picture is of my set-up for the final picture, and a good example of why you should make your bed every morning.
You may have noticed that the small gathering of links to the right has grown. Mainly for my own convenience, I updated the list of blogs that I regularly visit. I went to the trouble to group them into categories (Chemistry, Climbing, Photography, and Blogroll), but Blogsome won’t sort them accordingly on the main page. Oh well.
When making category assignments, I found a fine line between climbing and photography blogs. The following list of photographers have gained my respect and admiration and their images inspire me to get out of the house and shoot.
Jack Brauer
Tim Kemple
Andy Mann
Tim Tadder
Erik Seo
Andrew Burr
Strobist
I like seeing what local climbers are up to. There are a lot of climbing blogs out there, but the following are ones I actually enjoy reading, and most include decent photos of projects:
Straight Outta Bedlam
Hayden’s Rock Scaling
Mountain Project
Chemistry blogs? Yeah, I’m a nerd.
Totally Synthetic
The Chem Blog
And people I have the great fortune (or misfortune) of knowing. Some are better than others about actually updating their blogs.
Front Range Rants
Mad Scientists
Carbon Art Photography
The Life of Donna J
Carol’s DC Adventures
Enjoy.
[Insert picture of me with giant grin on face here]
Ski season is over, ice climbing is out, so I’ve spent a couple weekends in the last month trad climbing. I let my first pitch of trad ever in Eldorado Canyon, on West Crack of The Whale’s Tail (#1 below). It was awesome.
I want to lead something else, and I’ll soon have new gear to scuff up. Maybe this weekend…my email conversation with FRR went something like this:
Me: "I want to go climbing."
FRR: "done. where?"
In other news, my computer wizardry failed me for once this weekend. My portable hard drive crashed…I froze it (ran it directly from the freezer, actually), and it is still clicking angrily at me. Score one point for technology.
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