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ArcticMyst Security by Avery

pics 6/14

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This week I wanted to try to mount a bunch of lasers in a rectangle. I bought a piece of conduit and two PVC elbow joints and fit it on top of my two ring stands , where I could attach some clamps and have the lasers on the top hang down. This configuration still needs a bit of fine tuning but the set up did work to some extent. After using this set up once I know what I have to do to build one that will suit my needs. Hopefully I will build it in time to use when I photograph next week. The second part of this post I angled all of the lasers (up to 14 of them in some shots) into different transmission and reflective diffraction gratings. They are pretty much the same as I posted in my last post, but using more lasers. Some of them came out really nice. Enjoy.





 
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that 473 589 shot fills all of us with envy, way to be bruce :angel:
 

IsaacT

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Awesome shots! My favorite is this one:

ResizeofDSC_6517_zps68922b1d.jpg


It just blends all the colors into an amazing display of photons!
 
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I like the idea of all the laser beams converging on the diffraction grating... lots of rainbows and beams :drool:
 
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Photon image overload! I do have a question though. To what extent do you edit these photos? Do you do any post shot editing or are these all careful camera work?
 
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Hey Down with Umbrella,
Even though I do edit my photos afterwards, it is very meticulous camera work while taking them and setting everything up. Since I photograph lasers every weekend, I think I have gotten very efficient on doing it. I will usually tweak the contrast and make it a little lighter of darker depending on how I want it to look, and how it actually looked. After a take a few shots of a particular set up, I will turn off the lasers (usually RGB in test shots) and analyze the photos of that sequence in the view screen by zooming way in on the photo to make sure it is in sharp focus, and the subtle shades of color are present. After I do that I know what exposures will be good moving foward. Then, once I know there are a few goods pics in that sequence, I will add some laser or optics and repeat the above process. Most of the time the photos taken in a sequence, there will be one that is perfectly exposed, or very close so the post photo editing is usually just tweaking them. I enjoy the post production editing almost as much taking the photos as I can make my photos look better. Way back before digital photography, I spent many, many hours in dark rooms developing and printing B & W. When printing B&W prints I would make test strips at different exposure times to find out the best exposure time for the print. To me, tweaking the photos on a computer is not much different than tweaking exposure to get the best looking B&W print back in the day
 
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Thanks for the reply. Recently I had a chance to use an older cannon Reble XSi (18-135 lens) and I was experimenting with longer exposure and ISO settings. The backdrop were California's foot hill and last nights moon.
The images came out ok but I was curious to see how much you edited your shots. They look great. I suppose there is no standard to what degree you can edit them but I would imagine the better the photo is to start with the less you have to edit later.
 
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That looks like you had fun putting together and lots patience

Nice shots with the Dragon laser diffraction gratings.
 

IsaacT

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To add to the editing, honestly I feel like editing is a big part of photography. Even when people were developing film in darkrooms they still edited their images but they had to use a bunch of techniques not photo software. Photoshop is just a digital man's darkroom.
 

IWIRE

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Photoshop is just a digital man's darkroom.
It really is. I had an easier time navigating the analog darkroom though. I miss darkrooms and the interaction. Digital is a lot more convenient but it seems like part of the magic is missing. Probably just me.
 
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Hey Iwire,
I much prefer the digital age of photo editing. I remember coming out of the darkroom with my clothes and hands stinking of stop bath and fix all of the time! And getting the chemicals in cuts on your hands was always fun too if I remember. Even using tongs to move the photo paper from one tray to another, I still got chemicals all over. And then there is the cleaning up, mixing chemicals, trying to keep them at certain temperatures, etc. And of course the dim red light to work in. With all the photo editing software out there, even though I have Adobe Photoshop, and a few other high end programs, my favorite and most used for my laser photography is an old HP photo editing program that came with one of their printers I got in 2001. It is very basic, and pretty much does everything I need it to do. The latest edition of Windows it will work with is XP, so I do all of photography work on an old Sony Vaio XP computer, and all "normal" stuff on a Windows 7 set up that is the family computer. If I need to do some more advanced stuff, I will usually go to Photoshop.
 
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I still have fond memories of the high school darkroom.
There was a mystique about it that isn't there with
digital. What is really like that anymore?

We have definitely gained in the picture quality
department, though. It's so easy to see what the
picture you just took looks like, and a memory card
holds so many.
 




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