100/365 : The Northern “Pipe Cleaner” Penguin.

Day 100. Time for something a little special. Here we have a penguin, constructed out of pipe cleaners. I didn’t assemble it – this was a gift from my geocaching friends – Elf and Rainbow. Why a penguin? Well, my geocaching handle is “northernpenguin” so that’s why. 

About the photo. This is a 100% manual shot, and it’s a photo that was created, not taken. The pipe-guin is sitting on a mirror tile, which looks like an ice flow. The snow in the background? It’s a roll of paper towels. The photo is manual focus because I’m not using a straight lens-on-camera. There’s a 12mm extension tube between my Nikkor 50mm 1.8 lens and the camera body. Lighting is nuke the ambient strobist style. That’s 1/400 and f/8 to completely eliminate the ambient light from the room yet keep some depth of field. I have two flashes on either side – the SB-600 on the left is firing at 1/32 power and the SB-800 on the right is firing at 1/16 power. Both flashes are about 18-20 inches from the subject on either side. ISO 100.