Sparks

Well I was right, yesterday was a total disaster. After blipping, I did a few stretching exercises to get the blood back into my lower limbs and ease the searing arthritic pain in my hips. I didn?t even know that I had a hip problem. I should clarify here, that in Indonesian internet café?s, you sit on the floor. Then on to the telecom shop to pay my internet. To my absolute dismay, they were closed, still. Why cut my internet service if there is no way for me to pay. Now I am behind on about fifteen forum discussions.

With no internet distractions, I decided to pay my workshop a long over due visit this morning. I was cutting some threaded steel rod for a project and thought the spread of sparks was interesting and might make a good blip. It had to be a longish exposure and a small aperture, so it was tripod and complete darkness.

First go, I could not find the metal to cut and was in danger of ripping a finger off. A dim torch light solved the problem. It was important to the shot to hold the cutter wheel still for the two second exposure. I really thought this was going to be a big problem and had planned to make a jig to hold the Dremel hand drill, but a couple of the test shots came out really well and I was not expecting to do any better.

This was too easy after the trauma of yesterdays blip and it did not seem right to get away with so little effort, karma rewarding me for yesterdays perseverance I recon. So I tried a few more shots from a wider angle, to capture more of the spread of sparks. That went well too, as I was getting better at holding the Dremel steady with one hand and operating the shutter release with the other. With two good shots on the hard drive, time to experiment some more.

I next positioned the camera more end-on to the sparks. True end-on would have been really nice, but each one of those sparks is a burning spec of steel dust which is not good for cameras. In fact, if I had decent equipment, there is no way I would be doing any of these shots without a polycarbonate shield. The first few attempts did not go so well, the cutter kept moving, as I was stretching a bit more. So I set the camera to time delay, I could now use both hands to steady the cutter. This shot was even better than the other two. I was happy and had my blip for the day. I hope you like it, as a reflection of my day in the workshop.

Dave