Location Shooting

by admin Posted on July 9, 2012

A little before Robin was born, Jeff asked if I would be interested in making some studio-style images of her.

I usually cringe when people ask me to document their Kodak moments.  For one thing, I haven’t done any commercial work in over 23 years, and everyone thinks I am a better photographer than I do.

Then my mind ticks through my equipment.  Now that I have gotten more serious about evaluating my image-making capabilities, I can see how limited my best DSLR really is.  The chromatic aberration at wide settings.  The noise in low light.  The weird magenta tint that Canon spins into reds…

And the rest of my gear is a hodge-podge of things collected over the last thirty-plus years.  My light stands (from 1982) are falling apart, my seamless paper is in storage, my “studio in a box” (the shipping crate I carry stands, strobes and umbrellas in) is now full of doodads and hardware in a wide variety of condition and reliability.

The strobes I have are cheap little units that screw into light bulb sockets and put out about as much light as an on-camera flash.  So I am never sure if they will be adequate to light the space evenly, even when bounced from umbrellas.  So these photographic adventures are always about an act of faith and improvisation.

Fortunately, Robin is very very small, so I decided to use the dining room table as the set.  (In the test photo to the left, you can see a doll on the table that I used to make sure I was going to get workable results.)

I screwed the strobes into those clamp-on lamps you can get at the hardware store, and I bounced two off the dining room wall and one off the ceiling to create the look of being next to a very large window.

I held my breath and did my very best to channel Anne Geddes.  The results are not bad!  The light is diffuse and fairly even – as good as I have a right to hope for.

The rest I can handle in postwork – which reminds me that my version of Photoshop is also archaic.   🙁

Fortunately, these images need very little retouch, because I have a recently renewed focus (pardon the pun) on getting the image right the first time.  😉

 

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Aphelion

by admin Posted on July 5, 2012

The Aphelion occurs today at 0400 hours, UTC. (That’s 9 PM yesterday here in the Pacific Northwest.)

The aphelion is the point our orbit when we are farthest from the Sun. This occurs when the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing summer, which I always thought was a ripoff.

But this year, it makes me wonder how much worse the heat wave would be if this were reversed – if we reached aphelion in winter and perihelion (when we are closest to the sun) in summer .

Also, I wonder how much colder our winters would be if we did not experience perihelion in January.

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Assembling Crown Molding

by admin Posted on July 3, 2012

Many new homes have “great rooms” that make typical molding and millwork look puny. There are larger variations of common sizes available at the big box home improvement stores (5 1/2″ baseboard to replace 3 1/2″ for example), but sometimes even the largest stock sizes are dwarfed by a room that is kitchen, dining room and living room combined.

I figured out that the way to make large crown molding is to combine several pieces of molding intended for other, smaller applications.

I bought several pieces of different styles of MDF molding from Home Despot in three foot lengths, and used a chop saw to cut off three inch samples. The samples will stand up on a table, so I can arrange them and get an idea of what they will look like assembled. In the example I am showing here, there are two pieces of baseboard molding on the “wall” and “ceiling” planes, and there are two pieces of crown molding – one for the actual ceiling crown, and the other as a blind for rope lighting.

Once I’ve mixed and matched and arranged a pattern I like with the small cutoffs, I take the remaining pieces (two feet, nine inches) and tack them together so they can be held up against the ceiling in the location I intend to cover, which enables me to get a good judgment of the scale.  In this case, it’s simply too big – not only in overall scale, but the descender will interfere with the doorway. So I removed one of the two baseboard pieces from both top and bottom, and ran the spot check again. Ah! Much better!

Later this year, I will be trimming this room, and the research part of the project is now done.

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Legerdemain and PFM – 4

by admin Posted on July 1, 2012

Fitting Shelves into a curved space.

Our new staircase is curved, so the understair storage area is also curved. It is off the kitchen, designed to be used as a pantry. So, how to put shelves in here…

There must be an easy way to transfer that curve on to shelving material so it can be cut to fit.  Hmmm.

 

 

Get out your trusty Sharpie marker, and grab something to use as a spacer.

 

 

 

Trap a piece of cardboard along the floor with your foot, and trace the contour of the wall on the cardboard. Cut along the line, and Voila!  You now have a pattern!

You can use the pattern to cut shelves out of any material you like. I used wire shelving because I had some on hand.

 

This is the actual pattern I used for this project, with both curves traced on the same piece, with the distance between corners known. The back wall of the space was flat, so it became the reference point for all measurements.

 

 

The shelf ends need support, and fortunately MDF is flexible enough that when bolted to the wall, it follows the curve without a lot of complicated lamination or machining.

 

 

 

Here I am checking the fit of a wire shelf I’ve cut. The pantry walls are covered with all kinds of black marks that look exactly like they played ice hockey in here. So I am mounting all the support hardware, and painting the walls and supports just before installing the shelves.  This has the added benefit of making the supports look like they’ve been there all along!

 

Success!
I also mounted the shelving upside down, so that the reinforcing run would form a lip to keep things from falling off the shelves.

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Legerdemain and PFM – 3

by admin Posted on June 28, 2012

Replacing locksets and striker plates.

Every home past a certain age has a lockset or striker plate that has been removed and replaced multiple times by inept people, leaving a crater of mangled wood fibers where the mounting screws need to go.

If this happens to you, here’s how to fix it.

First, select a dowel that is larger in diameter than the damage you are trying to repair. Drill into the damaged area until you reach solid, undamaged wood again. In some cases, this means drilling all the way into the house framing (2X4s).

Next, dry fit the dowel to make sure it fits. Then put some glue on the end of the dowel. Don’t cut it to length because it is easier to seat it when you can hold on to a longer piece.

I usually dip the business end of the dowel into Titebond, and wipe off the excess on the inside lip of the bottle.

 

Work some glue into the hole you drilled with the wet end of the dowel, then in one smooth motion, push and twist the dowel until it stops.

Not too much force – you can easily snap off a thin dowel and pierce your hand. The operative word is “finesse.”

 

With a sharp chisel and a mallet, shear the excess flush.

 

 

 

Ah, a thing of beauty.

Give the glue a couple of hours to set, and you are ready to use the correct size drill to mount new hardware!

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Precautions

by admin Posted on June 27, 2012

We live in an earthquake zone that is in constant motion.

As a result, I have adopted a habit of bolting all cabinets to the wall so that a small tremor cannot make them fall on top of someone passing by, and to prevent them from walking out from the wall gradually over a period of weeks.

I also lean open cabinets back by shimming the front of the cabinet base, so any cumulative motion will tend to shake books and items toward the back of the shelf, not off the front onto the floor.

When we came home after the Nisqually quake of 2001, we were amazed to see our furniture rearranged, shelves partially emptied, cabinet doors open, and oddest of all – dresser drawers opened!

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One Month Already

by admin Posted on June 25, 2012

We’ve been here a full month already. How time flies when you don’t know what you’re doing! 😀

Here is Camille, trying to rehabilitate the kitchen last May. We hired a couple of housekeepers to help, and they spent ten hours scrubbing and still did not make it all the way through the kitchen.

As Amy put it, “There’s grease in places you never expect to find grease!”

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A Day In The Life

by admin Posted on June 22, 2012

8:40 AM
The new fridge is delivered. Chop-chop, empty everything out onto the counter tops and stand back. This is the first appliance we’ve installed that did not require a panicked dash to the garage to make or modify something to allow the install to be completed. Camille loves it, but all I care about is that I can have as much crushed ice as I want. George and Donald from Albert Lee were kind enough to move the old fridge to the garage, so there is now plenty of room for my stash of Häagen-Dazs.

10:00 AM
Camille’s son Bob is coming by to paint the upstairs hallway, so I have to fix the floodlight he has been using. One of the lamps failed, and it took a total disassembly to figure out one of the internal connections was loose from the factory. Increasingly, as things fail, I look to see where they were made, and the worst shite always comes from China.

 

10:15 AM
41 out of the 58 lamps in the house were blown or missing[1] when we took possession, which makes me wonder.  Did they not know how to change light bulbs?  Or did they save a bunch of bad ones so they could take working bulbs with them when they left?  The weird part about that question is that the sellers were supposedly leaving the country the day after closing, so what did they do?  Invite their friends to come by and help themselves?

There are many mysteries we will never be able to divine, and it’s really just as well.  The only thing that matters is how I will make everything better.  Fortunately, I still have a soldering iron and a spool of rosin core.  I rebuilt a fixture from parts of two and now the downstairs hallway has a functioning light!

11:00 AM
Now that we are living here, I see that I need to adjust the height of the top shelves in the walk-in closet. [2]

It was a small nightmare, because the left hand wall has a pocket door, so there are no studs, and mollys cannot extend more than an inch and a quarter into the cavity or they will hit the door as it slides inside.  No matter.  Improvise, adapt, overcome.

I moved the top shelves up another eight inches, patched the holes and dabbed them with paint.  Thank you Jay-zuz for my new laser level!  If you didn’t know where to look, you’d never know I executed a “change order.”  Of course, I’m not going to show you the pile of clothes I took out of the closet and loaded onto the bed that reaches halfway to the ceiling.

12:45 PM
While the paint is out, I’ll catch a couple of places that needed touch-up after I replaced the master bath light fixture a couple of weeks ago.[3]  Jeff came by and helped with that one, and we’ll be talking about it forever.

It probably would have been faster and less complicated if I had rented time at a glass studio and a metal shop and made my own fixture.

1:00 PM
Time to hang one of those wire racks in the shower that holds soap and a few bottles of shampoo.  You can read about this adventure in all it’s tedious glory here.

 

While I’m at it, the glass shower doors have swung loose – after someone bumped into them with her knee and sheared the spacer assembly off.

I won’t mention any names, but her initials are Amy.  😀

 

 

 

2:15 PM
OK. I just need to sit down for a few minutes. Enough time to run through Satriani’s “Tears in the Rain” a couple of times, and promise myself that I will find more time to play in the near future.

Bah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!

 

2:20 PM
Camille is back from Costco.

I just love how her trips to Costco sometimes result in puzzle for me that was made in China.

The old shoe rack (the white one to the right) was a piece of crap that she bought in a hurry to have SOMETHING by the front door for guests at our last place.

Truth to tell, I’ve never come up with a design I was happy with, so I still have not made something to really get the job done well.  🙁

2:45 PM
Time to reinstall some switchplates where the paint has dried.  I’ve found that the best thing to clean decades of filth and schmutz off these things is – wait for it – Scrubbing Bubbles!

Yes! The stuff you use to clean soap scum and lime off shower fixtures and unmentionable scum off toilets!

3:15 PM
At last!  It’s time to play with some POWER TOOLS!

I need to make a custom piece of trim for the master bedroom closet,  and it’s finally stopped raining so I can drag the saws out onto the driveway and make some noise and lots and lots of sawdust!  As my friend George Wnek would say, “There he goes again. Making big pieces into little pieces.”

Another cool tool is my 23 gauge air nailer, which tacks tiny things into place without splitting them.  Yes.  23 gauge – nails that are as thin as sewing needles.

Here, I have mitered the ends of a piece of MDF millwork, and I need the pieces held in place while the glue dries. This would be almost impossible to clamp – except with very large rubber bands, I think.

I actually managed to avoid nailing my fingers to the workpiece.  Bonus!

 

Slapping paint on the trim, it will be ready to install in the closet tomorrow.

These munchkin paint rollers are pretty cool, because they allow you to get the rolled texture on trimwork without loading up a nine-inch roller, which wastes about a pint of paint.

 

 

 

 

5:15 PM
Chop sawing studs to use as spacers under garage shelving. Nice and loud, for the neighbors who work nights.

Camille helped me for about four hours, moving boxes around, shuttling things to the crawl space storage, unloading keep boxes. We made quite a dent in organizing the garage, which is one of my two top priorities – immediately after crisis management, that is.

9:45 PM
Yippie Ki Yay!! I survived the day!  And yes, as the T-shirt says, “In Dog Years, I’d Be Dead!”

Of course,there is a looong list of things I did not get to, a list named after a guy called Hugh Jass, but tomorrow is another day.

Time for a Mojito.[4] Or two. Or six.

[1] For those of you playing “Peep My Ghetto Style” at home, that’s 71%.
[2] It irks me that I didn’t get it right the first time, but hey – my crystal ball was in the shop.
[3] Yes, sometimes I deliberately work barefoot, because I get more information about what I am standing on. As in, is it stable? Deforming under my weight? Falling apart? It’s the “four paws” approach, frowned on by OSHA.  This also gives you a clue about my Google avatar.
[4] The Best Mojito:
Pour 1 ounce mint-infused simple syrup into a tall glass.
Add a handful of mint leaves, and muddle it together. Add crushed ice. Muddle some more.
Next, add 1-1/2 to 2 ounces of light rum, depending on the kind of day you are having.
Squeeze in the juice of half a lime.
Add a splash of club soda and stir. If you don’t have club soda on hand, try Sprite.
Garnish with a mint sprig and a slice of lime.

For a higher octane rating, a little Absolut Citron helps speed you along your way, and you can sugar the rim of the glass with a sponge soaked in Rose’s Lime Juice.

Simple Syrup:
Mix 1 cup water with 1 cup sugar in a saucepan and heat until boiling.  Stir until the sugar dissolves (about a minute), then turn off the heat.  Toss in a handful of mint leaves and let it steep (off the heat) for an hour or so. Strain out the leaves and store in the fridge till you’re ready to use it.

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Legerdemain and PFM – 2

by admin Posted on June 20, 2012

Overcoming thread size mismatches.

So. I want to hang one of those wire racks in the shower that holds soap and a few bottles of shampoo. I get the brilliant brain fart that this faux crystal knob would work well, and look pretty cool, too.

So I measured out the best location, approved it with the boss, drilled through the ceramic tile and installed a molly. Then I trimmed the head off the molly screw and tried to thread it into the knob.

That’s when I discovered the screw that came with the molly is smaller than the screw that comes with the knob.

Here’s how you can get yourself out of a jam when your screw is too small.

Whenever I get rid of electronics, I do a complete destructive teardown, and I save a number of parts – springs and very small screws in particular.

This has, as you might imagine, inspired a fair amount of mockery – apparently it is “anal” to repurpose parts, and to be able to find them when you need them.  But nevermind.  He who laughs last, laughs best. (Or in my case, “He who laughs last, thinks slowest.”)

I selected a spring that was slightly smaller than the screw, and threaded it on to the end of the screw that was destined for the knob.

 

 

 

 

Before the spring was “screwed” onto the threads, I deburred the end of the screw that would receive  the spring in order to smooth the transition.

The fastest way to get this done is to chuck the screw into a drill, and at top speed, hold it against a grinding stone. When it’s smooth and rounded, you’re ready to screw.

 

Here, you see the spring threaded onto the screw, and trimmed to length.

Woo Hooo!  It fits as tight as a nun’s… ummm…  Well, ahh… let’s just say…  it’s a perfect fit.

 

 

Here you see the insertion, and the final application. Imagine. Without this blog post, you’d probably never figure out how to spend over an hour putting a knob on a wall.

 

 

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