During the April meeting, Scott Winter mentioned the passing of the famous wedding photographer Monte Zucker. Jack Dyck provided the following:

May Meeting - Guest Speaker

Details to be announced soon...

April Guest Speakers

Mika Anderson, Jeff Clement, Wes Devauld and Mike Roest
"High-Speed Photography"

Photo by Ryan Pahl

Photo by Ryan Pahl

Photo by Ryan Pahl

Photo by Ryan Pahl

Our April 4 2007 meeting started with a fascinating presentation by 4 of our members who are not afraid to indulge their photographic curiosity.

Jeff Clement, Mike Roest, Wes Devauld, and Mika Anderson did a tag-team style of presentation about their adventures, experiences, and mishaps in High Speed Photography.

Inspired by others who showed their high-speed photography on the World Wide Web, Jeff and Mike (the original instigators) decided high-speed photography was something they wanted to try. Their initial experiments were with light bulbs being shattered in the dark, with open camera shutters, and manually triggered camera flashes. The idea was to manually trigger the flash at the same instant as a dropped light bulb shattered.

As might be expected, the results were hit-and-miss!

They did, however, acquire some very nice images of light bulbs meeting their demise, some with the filament glowing, a very photogenic touch!

Having discovered that light bulbs photographed in mid-smash could make very satisfying images, Jeff's house rapidly became un-infested with spare light bulbs...

Craving more, they made a stop at Wal-Mart, and stocked up on light bulbs...

And dishes...

And stemware!

One can just imagine the sounds of breaking glass and maniacal laughter coming from Jeff's garage in the wee hours of the morning...

Several more of these sessions - now dubbed "Smashenings" - were held, and the number of participants grew with each one. Co-presenters Wes Devauld and Mika Anderson joined the fun, as did CPS members Kyle Johnson, Ryan Pahl, and Gary Evans, as well as several non-CPS members.

Later, they tried a sonically triggered flash synchronizer built as an electronics kit; while the results were better, consistency was still not one hundred percent. Nevertheless, they started to gain a much higher percentage of respectable images!

Having gained more-or-less repeatable results due to the electronic circuits, they decided to try something that would have been impossible to synchronize manually - bursting balloons.

They filled balloons with a small quantity of cornstarch prior to inflation, and used a staple gun to burst the balloons. Upon bursting, their photos showed the cornstarch retaining the shape of the balloon while the rubber envelope was partly disintegrated and partly in its original shape, and the staples - shot from the staple gun - were frozen in mid-flight! They showed the audience some very cool images - the balloon shapes were quite remarkable, and some very brief events could be seen clearly frozen-in-time in their images.

While the cornstarch really demonstrated the effectiveness of their techniques, it apparently left Jeff with a gargantuan cleanup effort the following day...

In their early experiments, they often spent 6 hours setting up for their sessions, and after capturing images and the inevitable cleanup, were done by 3:00 AM! Later, with larger numbers of participants, they assigned each person a homework assignment to be completed in advance of the event. This allowed for much quicker setup and more time for shooting.

Throughout their sessions, they developed quite a destructive arsenal for photogenic purposes. While a staple gun was adequate to pop balloons, smashing light bulbs and crockery called for more serious weaponry. They experimented with slingshots, BB guns, staple guns, a pick-axe on a pivot, a baseball bat, an air cannon, and a really high-tech alternative: hand-thrown potatoes!

And while different destructive elements were being tested, so were alternative triggering circuits. At present, they use a computer plus a variety of hand-assembled triggers, including laser beam breaking sensors.

Once they acquired light actuated triggers, they were able to try a different theme - with a different name for the events - "Splashenings"

Instead of smashing fragile items, they were photographing objects being dropped into liquids, like fruit being dropped into milk, and liquids dripping into pools.

They had some very nice images to show for their work in this area!

Of course, you'd be thinking that this pastime would be easier to clean up after than the glass shards from their earlier days, right? Apparently, Wes disagrees after he had to rent a pressure washer to get the milk out of his concrete floor!

Apparently, the splashenings just weren't exciting enough, because the crew chose a variation on an old theme.

They returned to the idea of smashing objects, but this time, they wanted to try smashing objects that are soft - after freezing the objects solid in liquid nitrogen!

Thus, these latest events have been dubbed Freezenings.

Flowers seemed to be the initial attraction; they showed some original and unusual images of flowers in various stages of being destroyed!

Among other things the crew tried freezing and smashing was a jalapeno pepper. Apparently the entire crew succumbed to the primary ingredient in pepper spray for several minutes one evening!

Now that technological issues are more or less conquered, they're concentrating more on artistic matters, like improving their backdrops and using light modifiers.

The foursome concluded their presentation by doing a live demo of popping balloons (no cornstarch!) and using a sound trigger. They got a perfect score of 2/2, most impressive!

Photo by Mike Roest

Photo by Ryan Pahl

All told, the presentation by Jeff, Mike, Wes, and Mika was one of the more entertaining evenings we've seen in some time. Their topic was presented with candour and humour. These guys are busy DOING interesting things in photography, not just dreaming about it!

Thanks for a great evening, guys; we look forward to seeing more of your nifty images! You'd have made Doc Edgerton (AKA "Papa Flash") proud!

- Jack Dyck

High-Speed Photography Flickr Photostreams: Wes · Mike · Mika · Jeff

Theme Print Competition Results
Theme: "Woman/Women"

Advanced Theme
Michael Sundberg
"Solitude"

Beginner Theme
Ryan Pahl
"Ladies on a Hill"

Open Print Competition Results

Advanced Open
Julie Meisser
"The Yellow Rose of Texas"

Intermediate Open
Jack Blair
"Our Hero"

Beginner Open
Ryan Pahl
"Cranes"

Photographers' Show and Tell
Marcelo Pinheiro

Photo by Rafael Perini

Marcelo took some time to talk about the a few of his images and what he likes, and doesn't like, about them.

Marcelo does a lot of his shooting in his basement studio using a single Alien B 800WS strobe with a soft box. Currently his work is done using the single strobe and no reflectors although Marcelo is planning on purchasing a second strobe so that he can fine tune his lighting more.

Marcelo shoots a Canon 20D and usually uses the cheap $130 Canon 50mm f1.8 lens. He had nothing but good things to say about the optical quality of this ultra-cheap lens (Tony Field even piped up and mentioned it handles flare better than the significantly more expensive f1.4). Marcelo did, however, point out that build quality was lacking somewhat as he raised his previous 50mm lens in two pieces (the front element fell off after two years of studio use).

You can find many of Marcelo's images on his website coolportfolio.com and also on the World of Stock.

-- Jeff Clement

Upcoming Competition Themes

The new themes for the upcoming year have been picked!

Calgary Photographic Society 2007 Executive

Contact information for the current executive can be found here.

Top of page

Newsletter Index

CPS Home Page

Review: Fuji F30
by Tony Field

I was looking for a small inexpensive P&S camera that can be carried easily in place of the large DSLRs and lenses. I tried a few frames on various Fuji, Leica, Canon, Panasonic, Sony, etc cameras. Most of them did not really impress me. A bit of research on the internet yielded:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilmf30/

and a delightful video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qFiEna9p4U

After I tried a few more cameras, I settled on the Fuji F30 for less than $300 at the Camera Store. The little beast has superb image quality at 200 to 800 ISO (as well as reasonable ISO 1600 and, if absolutely needed, ISO 3200). It also focuses very fast and reacts to a shutter press very well. Low light focus seems quite excellent. I made some excellent 13x19 prints at ISO 100 and 400. Overall, the noise is very well controlled - even ISO 1600 can be very useful.

The F30 is a very basic camera - no RAW shooting mode, no image stabilization, no face detection, no manual mode, etc. However, none of these features were of importance to me. The image quality and price were the deciding factors.

One surprisingly useful feature is the ability to do 30 minutes of video on a 2GB memory card. A sample 25mb video file is on

http://tphoto.myphotos.cc/noise/f30.avi

The jpg images are samples of my intended use of the F30 - basically for street photography and grab shots when the big Canon system is not being carried around. The images are large enough for you to get a sense of how the camera works under difficult conditions. None of the images have had any noise reduction and most have been cropped to about 1/2 of the full frame. Some colour adjustment was done - the auto whit balance is very good but still needs assistance in Photo Shop.

Sample Images: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6

DPreview also has a review of the Fuji F31 which has slightly higher image quality but a bit more noise.

-- Tony Field