So, roundabout winter solstice, and I'm using the dry weather to lift my entire roof, to replace the rotten purlins. Winter on the Highveld does not make for comfortable picnicking on a tin roof, so phonecalls are not exactly appreciated. It's the wife, she must have urgent news. She has; there will be an eclipse today, can I please grab her camera and take some pics? Yeah, right, that fancy toy of yours? But a man has to try. I know how digital cameras work, technically, but I've never used a professional camera before. Better be safe, then. This is what I came up with:
This shows the camera on a tripod, with a dustcloth draped over for shade. I am working on a hot tin roof, not babysitting a machine! The front is covered with heavy aluminium foil cut out to fit two welding helmet lenses stacked on top of each other. This made it possible to focus on the sun, but I would not try sell the photos. As a matter of fact, it looked no better than pictures I've seen of a children's trick. Never tried it myself, for some reason I never had a teacher tell me anything like it, but it sounded simple enough: pin a small hole in a shoebox to point at the sun. Make a second hole so you can see the shadow of the sun agains a paper inside... as I say, never actually seen it done, so I decided to experiment. The experiment turned into a piece of black styrofoam meat packaging balanced in front of a white paper board. No worse than the camera:
For lunch, I go inside, and the sun shining through the holes in the tin roof where we must still repleace the roof nails, are showing me this:
Moral of the story? If you know nothing of photography, but you are trying to build your wife a web presence, and she does not get around to writing something so we can test the darn page, then the man writes a photograpy article about how he knows nothing about photography and illustrates it with photos from his cheap cell phone. Job done, hope Dani speaks to you someday, she really is busy these days.
