Category: Creative

Making new photographic lamps

Making some new photographic lamps.

One issue I’ve had with both taking photos of people and close-ups of items is the lack of light. A couple of small halogens really doesn’t cut it, so I’ve been thinking over affordable and adaptable replacements.

I picked up a couple of clip-on lamp holders cheaply from EFG Housewares, a wholesaler I use for some of my shop supplies. I wanted to get some simple reflectors for them, but couldn’t find any at a reasonable price online. Even simple one-piece pressed aluminium shades seem to carry excessive prices. So it was off to the 99p Shop in Walthamstow High Street, where I found a couple of suitably shallow 30cm cheapo stainless bowls.

I next borrowed one of my dads Q-Max sheet metal punches. They’re very nice and provide a clean hole in sheet metals very easily.

I used a 30mm punch, but really should have used a 28mm or so. I measured from the inside of the lamps collet, not the thread. Whoops. But that’s alright in the end. I used my home-made centre-finder to mark out the bowls. It finds centre well on circles, but I also forgot the pegs on it weren’t the same length, so on the bowls curves sides it skewed the centre. So the error on one was enough in the end to correct for the error on the other! There’s a lucky break, eh?

Next up, a 10mm hole is drilled so the bolt of the punch can go through. The bolt is tightened and pulls the cutter into the punch block from the other side of the metal.


Voilà! A nice clean hole! (can’t say the same about the bowl)

I took some burrs off with a hand file and did the other bowl to match, then took them back indoors to fit the lamp holders to them.

Next I ordered some energy-saving high-brightness “daylight” bulbs off ebay. It took a few more days and a trip to the sorting office, but I got them this morning.

They’re 36Watt (180Watt equivalent), rated at 2160 Lumens, an 8000Hr lifetime and a colour temperature of 6500! They’re also wide mushroom-shaped coils, so should give a fairly diffuse light with no harsh shadows.

Without new lighting

With new lighting

And finally, fitting them they work perfectly. I was a bit worried the light would be too directional, but it’s both bright and pleasantly diffuse. I’m sure my opinion will refine the more I use them, but for the moment I’m pretty happy with the results!

(auto-exposure doesn’t like looking directly at them when they’re on)

Total cost:
Lamps – £1.65 each (Total £3.88 inc VAT)
Stainless bowls – 99p each (£1.98)
Lamps – £4.29 each (Total £12.06 inc Postage)

TOTAL: £17.92

That’s about the same as for a single studio lampshade. A complete lamp runs to about £50.

Jesse’s Diets – Day 1

Some details on my current poor financial state and the interesting weeks diet ahead.

This week I shall mostly be eating the unknown.

Due to my prolonged period of poor finances, this week took an extra bad turn in the form of exceeding my overdraft by a tenner as my card repayment came out. And this will accumulate in the form of a £25 Payment review fee and £15 for exceeding overdraft fine for three days (at £5 a day), as well as the usual overdraft usage fees and interest payable on the overdraft.

The upshot is that I can’t buy food this week.

But I was supposed to be in that same situation last week wasn’t I? Yes, and if I hadn’t I wouldn’t now be staring at an extra £40 hole in my accounts. And when you only get £50 a week, that’s rather a lot.

(If you’re curious why I’m not simply paying myself more it’s because the business coffers, while a lot healthier than they were, still have a long way to go before I can pay myself anything out of them. The only steady “income” I currently take from the business is £25 a month to one of the credit cards minimum payments. I live day to day entirely on my tax credit payments, while all the money I make is immediately reinvested into the business to try and build it further and faster. Hopefully with a view of getting that comfortable income from it before I become ineligible for said tax credits.)

Now, I should have nearly a fiver in my penny jars, and if things get desperate I can borrow something from the business kitty. Also my dad has kindly offered to loan me the money to repay the credit cards (which were originally only gotten because I was told I wasn’t eligible for a business loan) which I’ll only have to repay to him with the equivalent lost interest, which will remove some pressure. But that will still take months to arrange.

I hate accepting charity. It’s a mark of personal failure in survival terms. And this comes as close as I ever have to that. Psychologically I don’t have much to loose now. It’s relieving in a sickening sort of way.

So my survival task this week is not only to complete more business projects, but do so while living on a budget of about £4.92 and whatever I have in my cupboards. And it will be a challenge. Adapting recipes I can do, coming up with recipes from scratch I can do too. Cobbling together from what’s on hand for some reason I’m not so good at. But adversity breeds creativity, right? Hopefully more interesting than soup+pasta.

Friday 9th

Tonight’s dinner was a baked potato with a healthy dollop of butter and caramelised onions. It worked together pretty well. Simple but tasty. My granddads old advice about cooking the onions slowly worked very well.

I also bottled up the Elderflower Champagne I started brewing last week by this recipe. It’s bucket-brew week had developed it a healthy crust that came away with the use of only two wooden spoons. All bottled in Grolsh-style bottles I scavenged from a home-brew clear-out some years back.

They’re all stored away inside the old cast-iron stove now, where it’s cool and dark. And where any pressure related bottle explosions will be neatly contained. It smelt nice though, and what little I tasted from the spills tasted all right. Not like cats piss at all.

Tomorrow I’ll have to attack the ornamental plum tree in the alleyway. The fruit may be small, but it’s very tastey. The low-hanging fruit’s all gone, so I’ll cut a snag in some PVC pipe and use it to snare them. Hopefully they’ll run down the centre of the pipe and into a bag on the end.

I have a fair amount of old frozen veg in the freezer, some dried pasta and rice, and a few odd tinned things. I’ll be able to eat, I just don’t want to make endless things that are nutritious but flavourless mush.

UKFur Ladies Shirts Photoshoot pics

Posting up the best images from Saturdays photoshoot with Halo.

After some umming and erring, I’ve managed to whittle down the few hundred pictures taken on Saturday to just 18 of the best ones.

I managed to arrange a photoshoot with “Halo Husky” to help advertise the new ladies-fit variants of the ever-popular UKFur T-shirt designs, as I’ve previously blogged.

Lighting has proven to be the biggest issue in most, so I will have to invest in a portable reflector to help get rid of some of the harsh shadows in future as well as UV and polarising filters to reduce glare in other places.

Some shots had some very delicate tweaking of the gamma and saturation levels to get them up to spec. I’m very happy with the results so far.

Again, the uploaded pics are reduced to half size for the web. I have yet to pick which of the images will go on to be the new example images, but it’s satisfying to know I’m happy with all the options.

Please find the images here: http://www.sci-fi-fox.com/?page_id=50&file=Photography/Shoots/Halo%20UKFur%20Shirts/

Disaster fiction premise – fuel-air hurricane bomb

Pondering some disaster-porn based around the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill and the upcoming hurricane season.

Pseudo-Manitou on LJ just mentioned that tropical storm “Alex” has missed hitting the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that there’s only 10 or 20 more such storms to come this year (the period of concern of course presumes the oil spill will have been dealt with this year).

Now the worrying idea has been put about that the higher than usual methane content of the oil (30% rather than 5%, IIRC) means there’s giant methane pocket down there, and the new leaks appearing through seabed cracks could mean the seabed is going to disintegrate, releasing the 50,000psi methane pocket in a gigantic explosion big enough to send a supersonic tsunami several hundred miles inland in a few minutes. And it throws in a secondary tsunami for free as the ice-cold deep-sea water meets hot and now empty underground cavern in a huge steam explosion. And of course there’s the added bonus of the giant methane death-cloud to wipe out any survivors and those beyond the waves reach.

But it occurs to me that we’re missing out another possible bit of disaster porn here; What if a huge tropical storm does hit the oil slick? Right through the middle where the oil concentration is at it’s highest? Well it’d suck up a lot of the oil into it’s high-speed winds, tearing it up into tiny particles. And since hurricanes have a wide range of pressure gradients, somewhere in that hurricane it’ll have the perfect ratio of fuel to air for combustion.

One flash of lightning and a fuel-air bomb the size of Texas explodes.

If you wanted to up the anté a bit furthur of course, consider the wild possibility of the hurricane passing directly over the leak site and igniting. Fresh fuel being pulled up at it’s least diluted source, 70% oil, 30% methane, a constant supply of cold air being pulled down the centre of the funnel from the upper atsmosphere. Why specify cold air? Because cold air is more compact, and contains more oxygen. And with the fire adding to the heat, the convection could well anchor the hurricane on the fuel source.

This could plausibly be the first time in history we see a hurricane catch fire. Or explode.

Of course, the ratios for effective fuel-air explosive mixtures are apparently pretty precise, so it’s far more likely it’ll simply rain burning oil across the southern 3rd of the USA.

Pretty decent premise though.

Finally moving forward again

A little update on the Bonsai Repstrap project.

It’s been a couple of months since I last did any real work on the Bonsai RepStrap. My money’s allways close to the line, and most of it’s been tied up in T-shirt stock. However tonight I bit the bullet and ordered the next batch of parts. So I now have on their way to me:

  • 30x Miniature bearings, 3x10x4mm
  • 10x M3 flanged nyloc nuts
  • 40x M3 10mm stainless pan-head machine screws
  • 50x M3 15mm eye-bolts
  • 50x 0.7mm double-barrel crimp sleeves

Now, a lot of them may sound like pretty generic parts, but I’ve done my research to get just the right ones. The crimp sleeves for example aren’t the plain crimp tubes used in jewellery, but the sort used in sea-fishing. They’re double-barrelled so wires don’t get crossed inside them when crimped and get damaged and weakened. Small (and light) bearings at a good price were also a trick to find. But not as hard to find as the machine-thread eye bolts. While some place do them down to maybe M6, I could only find a single shop providing them with an M3 thread, and only in bags of 50.

To be honest, I’d prefer to have used M3 hook bolts, but couldn’t find anywhere that did them at all. Maybe later something will turn up.

They’ll be used in the wire tensioning system along with the flanged nuts and wire crimps. The crimps will hold secure loops of 0.7mm nylon-coated steel cable. Those loops will be fed through the eye bolts. The eye bolts will be retained in a recess by the flanged nuts. The recess will stop the bolt from turning as the nut is adjusted, pulling the bolt further into the recess and putting more tension on the drive wire that runs around the geared capstan.

That’s the theory anyway.

Until they turn up, back to casting and designing T-shirts.

Off to Focus in the morning, looking for some specific storage boxes and some 12mm mouldings. In turn to build the new cargo hauler around, and tidy up the rough Bonsai frame.