[BradJudy]

Nathan's thread about the vintage computer photography inspired me to snap a few pictures while at work.  Just playing with what one can do with a Canon A630 at the office.

OLPC antenna and ports:



OLPC keyboard:



Hard drive platters:



Slot 1 Pentium 3 chip:



Some wire-wrap on an old modem board:



Another view:



Something for the computer audio folks:



Better view so you can see what it is:

[ooheadsoo]

Some cool shots, even with that camera.  I especially enjoyed the wire shot #1. 

How're those OLPCs?

[BradJudy]

The OLPC's are interesting creatures.  It's nice that you can readily get to the Linux under the hood and install your own apps, but this power is limited by the basic hardware and custom GUI.  I don't know how far it will go as a project, but it's a neat piece of tech and I'm a comp geek, so I had to have one. 


And yes, I have some strange fascination with shallow depth of field combined with vanishing perspective type objects. 

[nathanm]

I like them, now they just need some more dramatic lighting.  I like the hard drive platters shot especially.

What's really fun to play with if you have a handheld flash unit is you set your camera up in fairly dim light on a long exposure and then pop the flash at various angles around the subject.  I used two bottles of orange and blue window cleaner as colored gels for the flash.  You can do a lot of experimentation very quickly without a whole lot of setup.

[BradJudy]

Thanks for the notes Nathan.  It definitely wasn't ideal lighting (office fluorescents plus a bit from the window), so more could certainly be done there.  I've never messed with color filtering a flash.  I do have a basic add-on flash for this camera that can be used manually or an auto triggered by the main flash, so I'll have to try that. 

I don't have a copy of the pic here at work, but I have one that I took with my 35mm (Canon AT-1) of some cave paintings that I did with a long exposure (2 sec IIRC) and waving two flashlights in circles around the target area.  I got lucky and it worked out well. 

[Levi]

Nice pictures!   Scary, knew a company in the process of archiving their data from a 5.25" floppy.

[BradJudy]

FWIW, this is the pic I mentioned using two moving flashlights in a cave. 



Thanks for the compliment Levi. 

One of my other pictures which wasn't worth posting was of an old IBM DOS 5.25" floppy.  I was also wondering about an interesting way to photograph an old 8.5" floppy I have sitting around.  While we've cleaned out most of the really old stuff at the office, some folks keep around some tokens of the old days that I can snap pictures of.