Petco, dump pig, splatter egg...

Busy at work. No chance to shoot. Had to shoot everything the day before, and I couldn't think of anything special to shoot. So. Stopped at Petco. No luck with mice; did better with fish:

f/2.8

1/20

ISO 1600

40mm lens (~60mm equivalent)

First of all, the Pentax does fine handheld at 1/20 or 1/30, thanks I guess to the image stabilization. Kind of an incoherent image, but I like that some of the fish are motion blurred and some of the fish are just out of focus. Really chaotic, as it was in the tank. Can't believe they put this many fish together.

You can see my reflection. I don't know how to do a straight-on shot like this and avoid that. I wound up choosing the worst, most overexposed image because it had the least reflection. Then I lowered the exposure in photoshop.

Stopped at the dump on the way home. Looking for something (anything) to use for blur shots. And there it was:

f/11
1/20
ISO 400
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)
Camera mounted on tripod

I tried to get a pan on Sheep Creek Road. Found a good spot and practiced on cars while I waited for a bicycle, which would be allowable under class rules. Waited 90 minutes. No bicycle. Had to be the longest bicycle-free span in the history of Sheep Creek. Got some really nice pans of cars and trucks though. Threw in the towel. Went home and did this:

f/9.5
1/2
ISO 80
zoom lens at 18mm (~27mm equivalent)

The pig is sliding left-to-right on the seat of a rowing machine. Camera is mounted on a tripod very close to the pig. Lighting via fluorescent grow lights. The white space at left is a monitor showing a picture of the selfsame pig, but you can't really tell. This was as clear as I could get the pig at half a second. Most of the exposures were much worse than this one. I like this. It's like some nightmare vision.

Still needed a stop-motion. It was after midnight when I thought I should do something with an egg:

f/1.8
1/3000
ISO 800
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)
Shooting in continuous mode
Two fluorescent grow lights, one positioned on either side of the lens

That's a 7/8" forstner bit drilling into a raw egg. There's one thing I would have done differently. The yolk is so clear where it is in focus, I think 1/3000 was overkill. I wish I'd slowed the shutter down and stopped down the aperture for greater depth of field. The flying yolk isn't moving too fast. It's just out of focus. The blurred foreground and background really detract from this. But how many eggs do you want me to clean off my walls?