Fun, Moonlit Night projects, for Children

[foxgrrl]

... For children with SLR cameras.

The cardboard tube, which comes in the center of a roll of paper towels or toilet paper, is precisely the same diameter as the Nikon 'F' lens mount, coincidence? I think not!

Materials needed for this project:

• One or more cardboard tubes. (If you can't find enough tubes, you can push/pull the tube out of the center of a new roll. Don't worry boys, and girls, and... other genders, tell your parents that aunt Julia Foxy said it was ok!)


• One can of flat black spray enamel


• A roll of Gaffer's tape, or Painter's tape. (Or Duct tape if you don't want to remove it from your camera.)


• A really bright flashlight.


• A wide-angle camera lens. (50mm or below is good.)


• (Optional:) A laser pointer.


• One or more tripods.


• A remote flash unit, or the sun. (Or a very bright flashlight.)


• (Optional:) One or two extra hands (and arms of course.)

Steps:

1. On some old newspaper, or plastic bags, or anything you wanted to pain black anyway, outdoors, spray paint the inside of the cardboard tube black. Don't bother with the outside, since the paint just rubs off on everything anyway.


2. Read Livejournal while you're waiting for the paint to dry.


3. After the paint is dry, wrap gaffer's tape around the edges of the tube. So that you don't get paper fibers, and black paint on the inside of your camera.


4. Stick the end of your tube... into the mount hole... of your camera. (Maybe this project isn't for children after all.) It should come to rest against the flat surface that boarders the rectangular opening where the mirror flips up.


5. Wrap gaffa around the base of the tube, creating a light-tight seal against the camera. And also preventing the tube from falling out, which it will do, the moment you attach a lens to it.


6. Tape your lens to the other end of the tube. Set the f-stop now, if you're going to be covering it with tape. For 28mm lenses and shorter, on the end of a typical paper towel roll, the object distance that you can focus on, is just inside the glass of the objective lens itself. So you would do better to tape the lens on "Backwards". In fact, the 50mm works better when mounted backwards too. This is typically how I use all of my lenses.


7. Line everything up evenly, so that the lens surfaces are parallel with your film/CCD plane. If you poke the tube too far into the camera, the mirror will get stuck on it after it flips up. (When you take a photo.) This is where a laser would come in handy, but you can do it by eyeball. (As I did.)

Usage:

• Find something interesting that you want to look at really really close.


• Move the lens, camera, and your head, back and forth to focus. (Much like focusing a microscope.) For lenses shorter than 50mm, mounted in reverse, the focal plane will be about 5cm or less, directly in front of the glass. For a 105mm lens mounted (suspended in gaffa) forwards, you can focus on an object from a much longer distance.


• It may be too dark for you to see. Shine your really bright flashlight on the spot where you're trying to focus. When you can see it in focus, press the shutter release button, without moving the camera a millimeter. Also don't move even the tinniest bit while the shutter is open.


• If you don't have inhuman muscle control, you can mount the camera on a tripod, and fumble around with it as you try to move it backwards and forwards. (Unless of course, you have a set of sliding rails) This also frees up one of your three hands from:
  1. Holding the camera
  2. Holding the cardboard tube so that it doesn't fall off.
  3. Holding the flashlight.
  (I use gaffer's tape for the flashlight incidentially.)


• OMG L33T NINJA SKILZ: I shoot almost all of my macroscopic stuff hand-held, at f22 (or f35 depending on the lens). You may ask: "With so little light, how do you keep everything from being a psychedelic blurry mess?" Here's my seekret ninja technique (That will be obvious in hindsight.): I put a remote flash, set to almost full power output, about one or two inches away from the subject. And I set the shutter speed to 1/500sec. (That's the fastest my D50 will sync with a flash unit.) Sometimes I use two flashes. I watch the image coming in and out of focus as my arm shakes slightly, and I hit the shutter button the next instant that it will come into focus. This also works if you're trying to take pictures of yellow Ginkgo leaves in a tree on a very windy day. With the really high outputs on the flash, you need to be careful about burning your subject matter.


• If you can move your subject matter. It is easier to attach the camera, and tube lens, to a tripod or two. And then move the object back and forth until it is in focus. The way I figure out, what is currently in the field of view, while not looking through the camera, is to shine my really bright flashlight into the eyepiece of the viewfinder. This will project a tiny spotlight, on exactly the area you would be taking a picture of, that instant. (If you took a picture, that instant.) The spotlight circle will get bigger and smaller, as the object moves in and out of focus. When the spot is at its smallest, that is when it is in focus. I think that a laser would be useful for this too.

[Footnotes: If you have an enlarger lens, or a microscope lens; You will probably get much better results using that then a reversed 28mm prime.]

So anyway, I slept for another 20 hours or so yesterday, and I felt not-sick finally (well except for the constant pain and all that stuff). So I had alot of work to catch up on, and I still have to pack and move all my stuff to my new apartment. So... I took a slightly larger dose of amphetamines that I usually do (because my regular dose has almost no effect anymore). One of the things about using amphetamine to treat ADD, is that it doesn't actually help much with the distraction part, or the setting priorities part -- unless you[I] take a high dose, or you have no tolerance to it. What it does in moderate doses, is to get your ass out of bed and doing stuff. You now have the energy to deal with distractions, and control your impulses, and follow things through until they are done. (Until your body grows tolerant to it, because your doctor insists that you take it every morning, and then it has about as much effect as an inert placebo.) (I've been off them for a while, trying to rebuild my tolerance to them.)

So, it's 3AM, and I'm building a microscope out of cardboard toilet paper tubes, and duct tape, like MacGuyver. All this time, I'm thinking to myself that I should really be packing, or finishing stuff for work. But I'm not. Cause I finally have enough energy to get up and do something, but not enough to channel it into mundane tasks. So, let this be a lesson to you boys, and girls, and so on... Don't do drugs, or else you'll stay up all night building a Tesla Coil out of your old television, or something. ...And knowing is half the battle! </PSA>

So... I wanted to take some pictures of the craters on the Moon. (Not the ones in Idaho.) My 500mm... well it can do this:

... but I wanted more detail. (That image is cropped, but not scaled. That is every pixel out of the camera. (UnSharpMasked though)) The 1.5x teleconverter I have is crap, so that was no good. (It makes larger, blurrier, pictures. The image has less detail than a simple enlargement of the original.)

So, for some reason, I got it in my head that extension tubes, and bellows, will increase your focal length, as the cost of decreasing the amount of light. So, I just had to double the distance between my 500mm and the CCD, to double the image size. Dur... duh.. except that this makes the lens horribly myopic. I figured this out once I tried it, I don't know why I was thinking that I could still focus to infinity. (Cause I missed that day in Intermediate Optics class.) (And I didn't think hard enough about what the doublet lenses in my 120 camera were doing, but anyway...)

So much for taking close-ups of the moon. However, I was wondering how much more magnification I could get with a paper towel roll tube...
To make a long story short, here's a picture of my LCD monitor. (Can you tell who's LJ this is?)

And here's a penny that was sitting on my desk, minding it's own business until I came along.

There's another part to this story about taping things to the wall, and wrapping everything in aluminum foil. But I have to get some sleep right now. So, the explanation for this:... will have to wait until later.