That and I’d pretty much be winging it since the viewfinder doesn’t work when you’re shooting IR.

Last week I remembered that I had an old SD400 laying around that I hadn’t picked up in a while so I decided to see what I could do to convert it to an IR camera. I spent a while trying to track down some developed unexposed negatives since those filter visible light but allow IR, but since nobody I know actually has film anymore that was a bust. I finally found some IR transparent plastic at Edmunds Optics that seemed to be perfect for what I needed. I ordered some and got it in the mail last week.

Taking apart the camera was surprisingly easy. I found the lens housing pretty quickly and the glass came out with just a pair of tweezers. The hard part was cutting the plastic I ordered to fit. I attempted to do it with an x-acto knife and it was taking forever to cut through since the material is 1.2mm thick. Finally, since the plastic is brittle I managed to just shear it off at some lines that I cut into it and get a piece of plastic that was the appropriate size. I reassembled the camera (with a shockingly small number of “spare parts” left over) and tried it out on my way to get coffee this morning.

I’m really pleased with the results. The images I’ve gotten are very sharp and the autofocus on the camera works as it should. The LCD on the back also works properly, allowing me to frame a photograph just as I would on a normal camera. The only issue I have is that the plastic isn’t perfectly opaque to visible light so there’s a red tint to all of my photographs when they should be nearly black and white.

The things I’ve found most interesting about the pictures are how chlorophyll reflects IR light (which is why the trees are white in the pictures), how lights that you normally wouldn’t see during the daytime are visible since they throw off a lot of IR and how glass that’s transparent visually is very reflective when photographed in infrared.

I’m really looking forward to taking this camera to some parks this weekend and seeing what kind of results I get with it.

1.5 hours filmed from my living room window, condensed to about 2 minutes. Taken from approximately 5:30-7:00pm on June 25, 2008.

This is the result of playing with my new camcorder. Processed by converting to an iMovie friendly format with iSquint, and edited in iMovie HD.

The ingredients:

• Bacon: sadly, store bought sliced bacon since I’m not going to have time to get up to Trader Joes for a while. I compensated by making a bacon weave! 12 slices woven together to form a tapestry of awesome.
• 2 eggs: Was considering using 3, but I’m watching my cholesterol
• Batter Blaster: Too hilarious not to try and worth the special trip to Albertsons to grab a can. The ingredients list didn’t look too bad either, better than bisquick at any rate
• Real Syrup
• Butter: Plugra, goddamnit. And more butter. With a side of butter.
• Sharp cheddar
• Love

The results are freaking delicious. The cheddar was perfect with everything else. It has that salty sweet thing going for it, fantastic.

Procedural pics after the break:

Last Thursday night I had just finished nursing a red wine hangover and I was thinking about them again so I got up from my desk and walked the 3 blocks to Church of Steel. I knew from a recent modblog(nws) post that they did them there and the shop has a decent name so I figured why not.

I talked to one of the piercers, Evan, and asked for three microdermals in my wrist. (Since I sleep like a Vietnam vet with PTSD I figured that the wrist would be the least likely place for them to get knocked around.) The interesting thing about the bodymod community is how fast things move. A year ago these things were still mostly experimental and to a certain extent they still are, and the idea that I can just walk down the street and get something like this is astounding to me.

Anyway, after doing all the paperwork I sat in the piercing room while Evan prepped my wrist and lined everything else up. The basic procedure is that the insertion hole is first punched with a small dermal punch, a regular piercing needle it used to elevate the skin and create the pocket and the jewelry, held with hemostats, is coaxed into place.

To be honest the only real painful part of the whole experience is the brief sting of the dermal punch, everything else is a walk in the park. There were a couple of odd sensations as the jewelry was maneuvered into place but nothing I’d really classify as pain. The last 48 hours has been completely uneventful too. There was a small amount of blood the following morning, that got cleaned up with a quick saline soak but other than that there’s been no pain, so swelling, no discomfort, no anything, just three steel disks sticking out of my wrist. The only time I’ve even really noticed them were when I smacked one of them while getting my mail last night and that was a brief 30 seconds of pain and an “oh shit” feeling but no noticeable lasting damage. I’m actually amazed at how much my wrist doesn’t hurt.

After 4 weeks or so I can switch out the ends on them to something a bit more elegant, and I’m really interested to see how the skin has grown around the shaft that sticks up out of my skin at that point. For now though I’m really happy with them and I think healing is going to be completely uneventful.

Yep, I’m insane.

USA Custom Guitars occasionally has specials on bodies so I picked up a 3 piece telecaster body for 90 bucks. Usually I’d want a light body for assembling a guitar, but in this case I decided to go for the cheapest one I could find since I’m a) covering the entire sumbitch in fabric and b) covering that in piles and piles of lacquer. Yeah, no thin-skin corksniffer nitro here. I’m pretty sure this is going to end up with all the sustain and tone of a banjo.

The tutorial I read on the net said to use wood glue, but I decided to use spray on adhesive to attach the fabric to the body. This might come back to bite me since I think the solvent in the lacquer is the same as the solvent in the adhesive, meaning that if I shoot the sanding sealer too heavy it dissolves the adhesive, giving me bubbles in the fabric (damn it).

Also, since I don’t have a patio on which to shoot lacquer this time around, I’ve decided to use the shower stall in my apartment. As this has no ventilation whatsoever I’m inadvertently huffing the lacquer and now I have a headache.

I’ve now finished gluing, the initial trim of the fabric and have shot a couple coats of sanding sealer. Something tells me I’m going to be shooting sanding sealer for the next month or so as the fabric is just starting to look like there’s lacquer on it.

A few months ago some friends returned from a trip to Modesto with a freezerbag full of cherries in tow. I could have made a pie or ice cream or something out of them, but I figured why not have a go at actually making a liqueur out of them. Back in high school I’d had a very sweet cherry liqueur at a friend’s house that was from a family recipe and I never thought to get their recipe before I lost touch with them so I was pretty much on my own with trying this out.

I hunted around on the internet for a while and read a lot of recipes, most of which seemed to revolve around the obvious ingredients of cherries, vodka and sugar. I found one variation that listed brandy as an ingredient so I figured I’d add a touch of that for good measure. The actual procedure for making the stuff is easy, just wash and slit the cherries, put the cherries and sugar in a jar and then top with vodka. After that just let it sit for a few months, give it an occasional shake and then filter it.

I ended up just using a coffee filter and a funnel to filter the liqueur into a Glenlivet bottle that I had. The liqueur that filtered out wasn’t the bright red that I remembered from my childhood, it was more of a rusty brown. The flavor of the final liqueur wasn’t as rich as I’d remembered it although it’s quite palatable once you get past the subtle essence of cherry nyQuil. While I won’t be handing out the end result for Christmas, for a first effort I’m going to call it a success. Changes for next time: more cherries, more sugar, less brandy. I also didn’t see what kind of cherries these were and didn’t taste them before I used them so they could very well be sour cherries as opposed to the sweet that I imagine my friend’s family used.

I think I’m going to try to replicate an espresso vodka one of the restaurants I frequent makes in house next.