RickHiC

I had to ease my girl into the hobby and watches in general. First step was a Cartier santos 100 xl for me, tank francaise for her. That's something dainty that sort of got her into the idea of, I don't know, watches as couture I guess. Now she's very on-board and we're often both wearing Panerais, which I happen to find dead sexy on a lady.

Dude, this is a thing of beauty: How can that be built new and delivered to my door for $35 and even work, let alone keep good time.

The setup for the shot I posted is kind of elaborate. I'm using a 55mm nikkor macro mounted in reverse on the end of a bellows. This lets you get to extreme magnification, but so little light is hitting the camera sensor that it's almost impossible to focus. In that shot I have a very bright high intensity discharge lamp pointed on the subject for focusing, then switch to a ring flash for the exposure.

6497 swan neck in tight. can start to see the flea eyelashes.

I was eating lunch the other day when I heard a tiny pop and clinking sound and looked down to see my front crystal on the ground. Nothing even brushed my watch; I had both hands on my sandwich. The center portion just sort of jumped out leaving behind a tiny lip of glass around the bezel. In any case, I'm trying to source a new crystal. Maybe real sapphire too instead of synth. The watch was from Josh (already emailed him), but I'm worried that will be slow and expensive. Any chance somebody has another source, preferably in CONUS? p.s. I tried searching this topic without success. When I click on "Advanced" next to search, I get the following error: "[#10L045] Sorry, the Links System is temporarily offline". The regular search box appears to only use the first search term, or it ORs multiples, or something else not very useful.

Don't despair. Your new camera is capable of much better pictures than any p&s. There is just a learning curve ahead of you. One great thing to try is putting it in full manual and selecting the aperture and shutter by hand (using the meter in the viewfinder). Experiment. Change them back and forth and examine the results. You'll get a better understanding of how cameras and light in general works. About that lens: it won't focus as close as many p&s cameras. That is not necessarily a negative. It does other things better. You'll have lots of fun with your macro lens when it arrives. About white balance: If you want to nail it pre/during shoot, shoot a gray card in your scene and tell the camera to set to that. I think the 400D can do that. Otherwise (and even better), shoot in raw. Then you can tweak white balance after the fact on your computer as much as you like with no degradation to the original image.

But hey wow free shipping! I didn't see that at first. That might be enough to sway me. I wonder if they would take 1.39m?

Is that the new iPhone Jake? My plain 3g model takes pics like crap (and I don't think can focus that close either). Those look great.

Somewhat off topic, but Ti can be anodized very easily as well. Similar to Al, but you don't even need dyes or caustic materials. I believe the process involves dipping the components in simple saline water and ramping up the voltage across anode/cathode. The voltage determines the thickness of the anodized layer, which in turn determines which wavelengths of light it reflects and absorbs, through almost the whole rainbow spectrum. I'm sure the exact process can be googled. Anyway, I've seen it in action. Different hobby: rc cars. Top end ones are gilt to the teeth with Ti parts exclusively to save weight and add strength (well, Ti and carbon fiber). Some buddies I knew made a very DIY tupperware dipping setup where they individually connected and dipped every last screw/rod/arm/etc. to a bunch of 9V batteries in series, and they tweaked things to end up with a stunning gold color. Looked just like 18K. In the end, the cars were gleaming with bling from every nook and cranny. I thought about trying this on a Ti case for fun, but I don't know much about durability and would need to build a variable dc power source. In theory you can do touch-ups to any newly exposed metal if you use the same original voltage/params/etc. You need also very clean parts to start with, but that's easy of course.

...when your wife starts asking you throughout the day if any new contest photos have been posted.

Quick trivia for the lazy (me). Are the torrents in HD? My tivo caught the episodes, but they were only on the standard def channel, and not discovery HD.

Holy jeez! Tell us more! I love chief and all, but we're just seeing spring where I live, and I bet there'll be snow on the ground again before I can get a crystal to him and back. Do you have any other ARed crystals to compare with?

how tf can they offer 10 bar of WR with a split case design like that? That is crazy.

The smallest quantity rc tritec sells is 1 gram in a kit. That's around $40 USD. The problem is their shipping is also around $40, plus you have to find a way to get a deposit to their swiss bank, which universally involves fees. I got a gram of C1 and a gram of C3 a while back for a total price of I think $167. Ouch. But there is a reason the gen watches say "L swiss L". Super luminova is the best. Crazy bright. The vials are absolutely tiny, but I actually found the stuff goes a very long way. I painted a whole sandwich dial twice, plus several sets of hands, and I'd say that's been maybe a third of a gram. Some more advice: Do some searching before starting any painting. It's really really hard. I think the best way to apply is with a set of oilers. You do it one micro-drop at a time. In summary, if you want to "just touch something up", you will very likely ruin it. If you're lucky, it's something bare metal that you can drop into acetone and start over. If it's painted, you are out of luck. That's been my experience anyway. I can be steaming along painting in say a perfect "12" marker and have one tremor/sneeze/bump/jiggle, smudge the dial, and just ruin everything. You wouldn't believe how horrible and fake an otherwise spectacular rep watch with a smudged dial can look. If you're very quick with the rodico, you might be able to rescue it, but that's been my main frustration: once the mix touches something, it's not coming back up, and any digging with pith wood/rodico/etc. just makes things worse. I would love it if some of the master painters would chime in with any tips (especially on how to correct mistakes), but they seem to be pretty tight-lipped (or busy/etc.).

Magnifique! I had thought of adding an additional datewheel over the top of the gears, but only as a passing thought. Obviously the difficulty is in the tiny tolerances. Anyway, now you've got a nice length of the finalized steel washer to work with. Is it easier if you slice it into a more manageable widths (say 1mm), then sand or lathe those down to the critical 0.4mm? If you can figure out how to mass produce this mod, you will have a line as long as chieftang's. Name a fair price

I still don't see any rodico in your kit. That is mandatory. Besides removing marks, once you have some, you won't believe how you ever manipulated hands/screws/etc. into position without it. I just got an ultra-fine plastic tweezers of ebay that I like as well. Doesn't have the precision of metal ones, but they have their place as they won't scratch. As far as the G9, it's in the shirt pocket of many a professional photog along with the rest of their gear. The saying goes the best camera is the one that's with you. Can't always have a big dslr over your shoulder. I think the G9 in particular is still a better value than the newer G10, and the video is not bad either.

This is fantastic. Do you offer 24 and 26mm? I can't decide which watch would look best. I guess I'll need to measure the final taper as well. In any case, let the saving up begin.

Understood lanakai. I didn't mean to throw a wrench in the contest. No more pics from me until it's my turn. I got a little ahead of myself Folks if you want more wallpaper porn I'm happy to make it. Tell me what resolution is good too. I have a few more waiting in the wings, but y'all are going to have to wait

No problem I assure you. I shoot for a living (part time anyway), so getting the creative juices flowing is never a waste. In terms of setup, folks could pull this off for less than they think. I would suggest aspiring photographers visit strobist and read through all of the tutorials. That site is (among other things) dedicated to getting pro-quality shots on the cheap. I have a pic of my setup for that shot on a card somewhere. I'll try to find and upload it. It was three speedlights, one gelled full CTO (orange) into the glass tile from below, one bare camera left, and another into an umbrella high and center. Exposure was I think around ~50mm, f/22, 1/250th with all light coming from the flashes.

Yeah, I was going to say, pics look gen, but the price is oh, 1000x too cheap. Owning gen Breguet is like owning a gen Ferrari. Make that owning a Ferrari with a custom parking space on your yacht.

Hrm, cartier santos xl (many variations, here's one: santos) for him, cartier tank francaise for her? Both reps have flaws but are not bad overall. Certainly passable to a non-cartier expert. The gens of course are very classy and understated (imho). I believe the crono version of the santos is more accurate to gen.

What kind of camera do you have? Does it allow manual focus? That is very helpful for closeups, but your lens will have a minimum focusing distance as well, and you may be hitting it. You might also consider a tripod for when you don't have enough light and/or lume shots. I think I see motion blur in some photos. Doesn't have to be fancy. Something like this: gorilla pod or this: ultra pod is very handy.

Ack!!! Why didn't I think of that? I should have shot my sub. Oh well, I was in a panerai mood. If anybody is curious, the splash is much too fast for your shutter to capture. You have to cut out all ambient light and freeze it with strobes. I used 3 here, with a flash duration of less than 1/50,000th of a second or so if you believe the Nikon SB-800 manual (1/128 power). It also took about 400 frames to catch the drop just right. I had a syringe in hand droppering away from a few feet up with the camera on tripod firing away at 8 fps.

I was at a conference all this week, so I did a rain shot before I left just in case, even though I'm in the wrong division. Now it looks like I have plenty of time. Oh well, might as well post it here. It was fun to set up. No fancy ps tricks, just a lot of equipment. If anybody is curious how I caught the "crown" drop (harder than it looks), I'd be happy to talk about it. I did however fog my watch. Haha, tested to 3 atm not quite. More like 3 millimeters.

What Asim said. I love hearing the ticking at night, and I now it's hard to fall asleep without it. (Except I keep wanting to open my eyes to appreciate the superlume C3 glow) If it's quiet at work I can even faintly hear it with my hands on the desk. Now that is just plain cool. Have you seen "Heros" on tv? Wearing my 183, I am Sylar baby! I like to sneak up on people and then steal their powers while you (the audience) hear that ticking sound. So far I haven't had much success, but I'm working on it ;-).