What yesterday's project was about...

Here's pictures of the completed project.

Sights go out to 2000m (2 kilometers!)

 I had bought this rifle thee day before, and since it was a used military surplus rifle, it was covered in a Vaseline type stuff called cosmoline. It keeps it from rusting when it is stored for a long time. I had to boil water and put the parts in there and scrub them a bit to get it off. I used some sort of turpentine or mineral spirits for the magazine, and now it kinda reeks. I thought it would be complicated to take apart, but it was easier than a lot of my toy guns.

New Griswold No. 5!

A few days ago I went to an antique store and picked up a new cast iron pan. It was $12, and they didn't want to negotiate on the price. Still, I bought it. I think it is my new favorite pan.
These were made until 1957, and I think this pan dates somewhere between 1937 and 1957. 

A recipe!

I have a recipe for you! I think I'm turning into quite the cook now. Here it is.

1 can of tuna
1 egg
some crackers

Crush the crackers and mix everything in a bowl, then fry it in little patties (I got two from this). The I put it between two halves of an English muffin and added some mayonnaise.
I didn't photograph the event, however.

Since this blog thing is called "Zak's Pictures" I might as well throw some in. They're unrelated to the tuna thing.

I don't invert the colors too much, so I decided to throw one in.

Handy tool

Back from Michigan

Well, the pictures today don't follow any sort of theme or trend, they all are a bit different. I suppose they are all from Michigan, though.
I have also been thinking about getting a Facebook account, as it seems like a lot of people have thrown email to the wayside and use Facebook now. For some reason, I'm still a bit hesitant. What do you think? Is it worth it?

Anyways, here are the pictures.

Blueberries! Yum!

$0.49 ice cream

Thought I'd try one in black and white and gray

A little experiment

Today I tried taking just 5 pictures (well really 4). I decided to use my little light tent thing that I made. I turned off the lights, and opened the window so only natural light came in. This required a longer exposure, so  I got out my remote shutter thing and turned on the mirror lockup option. I put the ISO to 100 to minimize noise. I used my 18-55mm lens almost all the way zoomed.

The first picture here I used to set a custom white balance. It was just a piece of printer paper:

I looked around for a subject, and saw my gyroscope.
f/16
10 sec
ISO 200

pattern metering mode

Next I photographed a dried out rose.
f/16
15 sec
ISO 200

pattern metering mode

I realized that the pattern metering mode was making the flower too dark, so  I switched to partial metering (which I also like to use for bugs and flowers).
f/13
30 sec
ISO 200

partial metering mode

This is where I put the ISO down to 100, and used one of my homemade reflectors to put a bit more light on the front.
f/14
30 sec
ISO 100
partial metering mode

If you have any tips, hints, or suggestions about how to make this better or what I might have done wrong, please leave a comment. I think a few things that I'll do are: (ooo I found the bullet points)

• add more light to get rid of the lengthy exposures
• start with the ISO down to 100
• use my 50mm 1.8 lens, it is a bit sharper
• try a different background besides white

Some of my efforts with Photoshop

I saw a tutorial on the world wide web about a nifty thing to do with Photoshop, so I decided to give it a whirl.

 I think this was the link:
http://cgscdoc.tripod.com/lizshomework/id11.html
Any suggestions would be nice. :-)

One of my friends

Today I was digging around  in my old pictures (again) and found my violin ones. They were a bit hard to do, as I had to put the camera on self timer, and hope that I would end up in the frame and the focus would be fine.

On a side note, Photoshop Elements 1.0 has stopped opening for me, claiming that there is insufficient RAM or something like that. I haven't even got my $5 out of it yet, I don't think. I was hoping for it to suffice for at least 6-12 months before I felt like an upgrade would be nice. I had to use GIMP, which isn't bad at all, but I think Photoshop is a bit more well designed, doing things is faster and easier.

Anyways, here's my violin.

The ugly cousin of the violin: the viola.

I included a picture of  a viola (my sister's). They aren't actually all that bad, but I just had to put it in there.

Planes

Not the things that fly, but the better kind. These two were from that one garage sale... (are you tired of hearing about it yet?) Block plane, then No. 4 plane.

The smudges and fingerprints on the metal show up quite a bit, so I'll have to remember to wipe shiny things clean. I also had to clone out some smudges on the paper they were sitting on.

Testing the light tent

So I put some of my new tools and other stuff in the tent and shot at them with my camera a bit.

Clip clip

Me with my new cheap remote shutter button

My planes

 Today I leave to Finland, and this is the first of the automatically posted posts. The ones for the next few weeks will have been written ahead of time. Hopefully this works.

Another garage sale post... this time featuring my two new Stanley planes. One is a block plane of sorts, the other is a No. 4 (smoothing) plane. The other one that I have is a No. 5 1/2 jack plane. I don't count the junky Buck Bros plane, it hardly works.
Anyways, I took them apart and cleaned them. There is still a bit to do, but at least they are clean now. I put the brass tote and knob screws in the drill press and sanded and polished the nicks out. The irons still need to be sharpened, I think I'll wait and get a extra coarse diamond stone, my other stuff doesn't quite cut it (well it goes really slowly, I spent probably an hour on one blade and it still wasn't done).

All the parts ready for cleaning

After cleaning and reassembly. The two rods are from the 5 1/2 jack plane, which was already cleaned. I just took out the brass screws and shined them up. :-)

The adjustment screw and frog adjustment screw.

 What's left to do: Sharpen the irons, flatten the soles, and maybe refinish the tote and knob on the No. 4.

My new bike

These aren't very great pictures, but I just wanted to get a few of my bike. The bike was $15 at a garage sale, and there was no rust and little grime, and the tires looked almost new! I added the speedometer, but the rest of it was from the garage sale.

Front Brakes

Rear derailleur