Light bowls

The small central corridor of our flat is lit by an old IKEA cable track light with three spots. We got it with the flat and I kinda liked it, but as I stumbled upon shiny white bowls with inner golden coating its day were numbered.

Goodbye, boring lights.

I used the cable track and the original mounts to attach the bowl, which in turn got an 1157 car light socket installed. I wanted to install LED lights and therefore put an rectifier on top to convert the AC from the IKEA transformator to (100Hz pulsed) DC. I used rectifiers about 50x to big which enabled me to use the AC input wires as mounting points (~1mm thick) to hang the lamp from.

One LED is already dead...

The cheap 'warm' LED lights I bought produce a strange ghostly light. Not perfect. And the 100Hz kinda show, maybe I will put some caps on there.

But they look nice in the corridor, I will try to get other lamps to improve the light temperature.

Male fish market

A snapshot from the fish market in Male. Our honeymoon was great! =)

Bigger here.

Un-crap tripod

My girl bought me a Manfrotto 785B over 8 years ago. I liked it because its really light but was stable enough to mount my Panasonic FZ-8 and later my E-P1. That said, it was still ok to use with the E-M5 but I used it a lot with that camera and this showed at the head which couldn't be fixed down properly anymore. 

Original

Being one of the cheaper Manfrotto tripods the head is not swappable, only replaceable with the same one. Nevertheless I wanted to upgrade to a better head and found the Manfrotto 494RC2 with mounting plate which is easily big enough to hold my E-M1 with 50-200 SWD (~2kg). 

Modded

I removed the old head and used Plaast (hand-formable thermoplast like Fantastic Plastic) to form an end cap to protect the old thread. After it hardened it was easily unscrewable, so I can mount the old head again.   

Then I turned the lower part of the center post around, unscrewed the original end cap, wrapped an 3/8 inch screw in Plaast and slowly screwed the still soft material in the thread. I fixed the screw down while the stuff was hardening and was already done.

A bit of way on the center post was lost, everything else is great. =)

Married life

Sorry for the lack of updates. I married my kick-ass wife and had not much time to do anything.

Here is a photo of our wedding rings made for us by Karl Pfefferle.  He made them in Mokume Gane fashion from Gold and Palladium and we love them.