Making puppets and making puppets

Another week, another puppet finished – in a little over a week Late Night Puppets will be opening in Wellington, part of the 2018 Fringe Festival.  It’s a playful improvised show, with as the title suggests, a few puppets in it, as well as a bunch of human friends.  Most of the puppets found me through ebay, but a few, five or six if I keep sewing, will be puppets I’ve made.

Here’s Cinnamon or Caramel or Ginger (he/she goes by various names), whose arms were stitched on just in time for today’s training session.  cinamin2

The eyes are from a $1 toy found in a charity shop, with added doll eyes replacing the original black spots.  I felt vaguely guilty about cutting up a creature just for the eyes, so also reused the fabric horns, and made a blue and pink tongue out of one of the original legs.

In pieces on Friday

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Bee yoga

This little bee’s grooming routine on my hotel balcony was like some kind of impressively athletic workout.

35mm macro lens, IR modified camera, f/9 1/250  iso 320

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And here, a much less elegant pose

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Spring, tralah etc

I spent last weekend in Christchurch, a city justly famous for it’s blossom-tree filled parks.  Thinks look just a little different in the near infrared: branches about to burst with buds are glowing already, and sometimes colours sharply different in daylight aren’t (magnolias for egs, the dark dark purple kind and the white kind, both look the same).

Duck Lake, closeup blossom and a Field of not-golden daffodils, all with the 35mm lightweight macro lens which has become my go-to holiday lens choice.

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The joy of processing!

There are people who proudly proclaim that their photos are all “just as they came out of the camera”.  I am not these people. I am particularly not these people when it comes to working with the IR mod camera.  Images need to be processed or they’d all just be a sad red fog.  Let me show you . . .

ir mod camera processing

Roughly, the processing process here went like this (clockwise from the top left).

  1. The in-camera jpg, which is pretty much what my camera’s viewfinder shows me
  2. The raw file with default settings
  3. Custom camera profile applied and brightness etc adjusted in ACR
  4. Colour channels swapped in Photoshop, tweaking (I like the Nik HDR filter to add some structure, though not tooo much, also playing with the colour balance) and finishing with a high-pass to zing up the fur

One of the aspects I enjoy with this sort of camera (with the sensor that filters out non-visible light removed)  is that as well as all the usual photographic fun of choosing subjects and lenses and apertures and shutter speeds and  all the rest, there’s also a very necessary bunch of extra creative choices to make.

  • Before the photograph: which filter to catch which part of light our eyes can’t quite see naturally
  • After the photograph: all the different processing choices.  So many choices.

Much fun.

Prairie Dog

Part of the joy is the joy of discovery, revealing an interesting or unexpected image hiding in an unprocessed fog.

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IR Huka Falls

Huka Falls

The Huka Falls are a 10 minute drive away from Lake Taupo township, and a road-side tourist photo trap of epic proportions.  But the place is not quite as exciting as it was when I was a small child.  Way back then the bridge over the most squeezed part of the gorge was just a narrow swing bridge, and my darling brothers would usually jump up and down to make it bounce.  It was quite slippery with spray most of the time as well.

Huka Falls
Looking upstream, from the bridge

These with the IR mod camera, 35mm lens and a 590nm filter. Colour swapped.