Added a new page

Today I decided to expand my photo blog. Rather than having just high-speed and technical photography, I decided to put all of the kinds of photography that I love to do on my own, on the site. It will be covered slowly because I am doing various other things as well.

This is the current addition. Tabletop photography can be fun. This is supposed to be French even though the tablecloth is a plastic tablecloth that came from Walmart. The cutting board came from Walmart. The knife came from one of the dollar shops. The glass, bread and cheese came from Walmart and the dye used to color the water came from Party City. The lamp used to illuminate the scene is a standard gooseneck desk lamp with a 40w incandescent bulb - both from Walmart.

I have a few LED bulbs but sadly had my first casualty among my LED bulbs the other day. The photo below was taken with my cellphone. This was an LED bulb that I bought on ebay from China for about $8 back when LED bulbs were hot new stuff. It lay in a drawer for a few years because it was just too blue to be useful for most things. Then the bulb over my stairs blew. That was a florescent bulb and the base exploded. Fortunately I managed to remove it with a pair of pliers. Thus, for about 6 - 8 months I have had this bulb as my stairwell illumination. Yesterday I looked because I thought the light was a bit dim and found a lot of the LEDs had failed. Fortunately as I don't need a lot of illumination on my stairwell, I don't need to replace it yet. This was poor though for a light alleged to last 10,000 hours plus. Clearly I will have to try a different form of stairwell illumination. Perhaps a different brand of LED bulb.

For photography, LED lighting is wonderful. It emits no heat and is very directional and easy to control. I thoroughly recommend LED for all forms of photography with one caveat - make sure the color balance is good. My current desk lamp is LED also and tends to be a shade on the green side.