Lightcircle

I found another self made lamp in the flat! Again one that produces no usable light. ;-)

As we went to the big garden center to buy all the eucalyptus seed pods for this monster, I ran in this, a big 1 meter diameter iron circle with a simplified flower motiv. After taking it home without really knowing what to do with it, I got my hands on a few high quality Osram SMD LEDs.

After a few hours work, I've rigged all the LEDs to the circle using the frame as ground. Only one wire is necessary to every LED, the wiring is nearly invisible.

The light has a strange opaque quality. It looks a bit like frosted glas is right under the frame. Sadly in the last years the lamp lost one of its 'leafs' (upper right) which I ascribe to damaged wiring.

Yellow steps

Yellow lighted stairs in the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart.
I love how the yellow light strips continue as reflection left and right, and how the top of the steps tilt. And the intensity and clarity of the colors. And I love orange. =)

One of my favorite pictures.

A great white one

No, not a whale. A picture!
A photo from Newzealand, Queenstown on the South Island to be precise. I ordered it from WhiteWall in 100 x 75 cm as a textile print on a wooden stretcher frame.

It's completely white in natural light. Under my halogen living room lights... well.

I tried to make a photo of it with bouncing flashlight, but this produces massive moiré over the whole picture for some reason, as seen on the ducks to the right.

Absinthe

To compensate the loss of color in my blog.

I made this last weekend. A typical photo of the green fairy. I don't really know what happend to introduce that raster over the red light, some kind of jpg artifact I think.

On other news, I just activated my Flickr Pro account!

Desaturating the blog

I wanted to have a colourful template for the blog, but the pictures seem to vanish beside the aggressive violet. Lets see how long I'll stand to look at all this gray.

Well, it's the content that matters... ;-)

American in France

A nice ride in Strasbourg. Very nice city btw, especially for photographers.

Motorola Droid 4 in original Atrix LapDock

 I was always a big fan of the Motorola LapDock. The concept of having a smartphone with so much resources that it can be used like a laptop is awesome. I really think that will be the future.

Think about it.

In your pocket: A kick ass smart phone with all your data and accounts. Insert it into the lapdock (which can be super sleek and light due to being just a screen and keyboard with a big battery) and you have a Android based Laptop (Future: chromebook).

Who needs a normal laptop anymore?

Anyway, Motorola was first to implement this and sold this thing, the sleek all aluminum 11'' Motorola LapDock, only usable with the Motorola Atrix. After that one they shipped two newer models which could be used with most of Motorolas other Android handsets, but this one is the best designed.

I got one cheap on ebay (65€) and as you can see on the right picture, that is no Motorola Atrix in there, that is my Motorola Droid 4.

That was made possible through a tiny hardware hack. All that is needed to do is turning the mini HDMI and micro usb ports inside the docking cradle. All in all maybe 30 minutes work. Some trimming was necessary to turn the connectors around.  I don't know why they didn't ship it that way in the first place, everything works out of the box (except volume control if using the speakers in the dock ... which are worse than the one in the phone).

I don't know if I will use that thing much. Its pretty light, thats a plus. Decent keyboard too. I bought it for my Rasberry Pi in the first place but got the idea the moment I had it in my hands.

 Some more proof in the picture to the left.

It's sad that Motorola is leaving the whole LapDock idea behind. The newest phones come without support for the docks. I really believe that this is the future. Smartphones are so fast already, in 5-7 years time most people will need nothing else but their phone and something to give the interface more room.

Some further reading

Kitchen ball lamp

I'm didn't realize how many lamps I made!

We wanted a cool looking lamp for our biggish kitchen and decided to build it ourself.

After getting inspiration in a big florist store, we bought a 40cm wooden ball made out of willow twigs and 5kg eucalyptus seed pods, found a strong brass chain in my fathers basement and got to work.

Thats the result shortly after hanging it up. The cables got sorted out as well. The photos show it with a 100W lightbulb which produced really awesome pattern everywhere but was sadly  completely unusable as a light source.

I installed a round fluorescent light instead, which produces enough light to light up the table below and does not throw shadows everywhere.

I think there is nothing in this flat (except maybe my girlfriend) thats more often photographed then this lamp.

I made the right one with my analog camera (Olympus OM-4 TI with 50mm 1.8).

A few more pictures and bigger resolutions...

Sun

A sun with the sun. Do I need to say more? =)

Bathroom lighting

Our old mirrored bathroom cabinet had two halogen spot lights on top which where failing.
I love the light temperature halogen lights produce, but wanted to replace these lamps with something more progressive.

I took a 500x10x10 mm aluminium U profile and glued a cheap 12V white LED strip into it. Then I took two of these and used one of the old halogen mountings to fasten them to the cabinet. Done. =)

The light is a really blue white, and exactly the opposite I normally like. I think everything looks like a car commercial in this light. Maybe I replace it if I find something more my color.


Nevertheless, I like that there are no shadows anymore (good for shaving) and it really looks cool. =)

Material cost: 15€