Hybrid lilies at Wal-Mart. Photo from 2005. As all of the 2005 photos I am posting this month, this is a new edit with a lot of extra color and contrast.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/132, F2.8, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2005-10-24T14:12:34-04, 2005-10-24_14h12m34
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A macro of pink flowers with water drops, using the flash. Photo from 2005.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/30, F2.8, 5.8mm, ISO100, 2005-10-10T07:33:41-04, 2005-10-10_07h33m41
Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL 32174-7227
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A swirl of clouds in a blue sky. This is from 2005. The only problems are the power lines and over-exposed clouds; otherwise I think it looks great.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/2000, F4.7, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2005-10-07T17:43:10-04, 2005-10-07_17h43m10
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This is a photo I took over three years ago of a bunch of electronics. I put this photo on deviantART in 2006 June.
I remember this being very hard to set up. I had a junky point-and-shoot with no ISO control, so I was stuck with about a 1/15 shutter speed. In one hand I held a spotlight while in the other I held the camera. It was hard to get a clear shot, and getting everything in frame took about two hours of moving things around.
The title is a joke. Most of the stuff in this photo is old, failed technology, that obviously won’t be in our future. Included: an AOL 3.0 CD, an SDRAM stick and an even older type of RAM, a PS/2 mouse with a bunch of old adapters, Nintendo e-Reader cards circa 2003, a VHS tape, 8mm Panasonic camcorder tapes, an onion, a fork, a Mattel JuiceBox, an HP LightScribe blank CD, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles folder, a Nintendo Zapper lightgun from the 1980s NES game Duck Hunt, a floppy disk, chopsticks, a calculator, a drawing I made of a water cup, a large audio jack, a shrimp flavor packet from ramen noodles, an old TracFone, red thumbtacks, an old sound card, a dial-up modem (PCI), a Dinacell battery (Duracell knockoff), lip balm, and a Kodachrome slide from the 1950s.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/12, F2.8, 6mm, ISO100, 2006-06-14T21:39:02-04, 2006-06-15_01h39m02
Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL 32174-7227
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please credit me as “Photo by Richard Thripp” or something similar.
The hard drive that never was. Waterlogged is two years old, coming on the heels of Raindrops, but a classic nonetheless. This was the hard drive from my first computer, a budget desktop I got in 2000 (I was 9 then). In February of 2005 it failed, and I’d just left it sitting around till June of 2006 when I cracked the case open (harder than you’d think) and took this shot. The drive is a Seagate ST34311A. I was walking around the yard positioning it as a mirror, creating interesting compositions (Blend In is another), when it started raining. The hard drive got wet, and that inspired this photo. The platters make quite a mirror, making the reflections in the drops quite sharp. After drying, the mirror was covered with spots and dust I never could get off, unfortunately.
Don’t ever open your computer’s hard drive, unless it’s broke and you’ve backed up your data, or you have no hope of recovering it. The read/write head you see in the picture hovers on a cushion of air one-tenth the thickness of a hair, produced by the velocity of the spinning disk(s) (7200RPM is common now). Even a speck of dust on the platter can mess up the drive and destroy your data. Hard drives are really fragile, and generally a bad way to save information, but they’re still the best thing we have to store a lot of changing data, cheaply and quickly. Back up your pictures to CDs or DVDs too, as they’re more stable.
Many hard drives have multiple platters (two to five), but this has just one. I found out the disks aren’t thick (slightly thinner than a CD, though very rigid), and they’re double sided. Underneath is another head that moves in tandem with the top one, reading and writing data to the underside. I still have pieces of this drive scattered around the house somewhere.
My finger sneaked into the frame on the top-right, darn it. Had to clone it out in Photoshop. Same for the bright edge at the bottom-left, and the silver bolt at the top, because they were too distracting. I converted to black and white and added a good bit of contrast, making the image more appealing.
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Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/139, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2006-06-25T19:03:53-04, 2006-06-25_19h03m53
Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL 32174-7227
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Photo of an American Cockroach, which I found on the floor in our house (we see these pretty often). I hit it a few times with a fly swatter, but then thought to put it on the counter and take a picture of it, with some food and food-related items in the background, plus the fly swatter, to make it more disturbing. On a technicality, he was still alive when I took this photo (moving his legs around a bit), but I didn’t want to hit him anymore so as not to crush him. Luckily he stayed still through the exposure, though you can see in the photo he has one of his legs up. Afterwards he had to be killed, of course. You’d think this’d be distasteful, but it just isn’t for some reason. 
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Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/5, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO100, 2006-04-29T23:40:33-04, 2006-04-29_23h40m33
Location: Thripp Residence, Ormond Beach, FL 32174-7227
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The fourth entry in the series, containing four of the respectable spheres. You already knew that from the informative title, though.
I was innovating with placement of the still life here; one is at the front, two far back, and one back even further. It’s pleasing to my eyes, as is the contrast between the sky reflections and dark marbles, even if the table goes to white.
I added contrast, removed dust, and kept the blues under control, as normal.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/185, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2006-05-31T14:21:36-04, 2006-05-31_14h21m36
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This is marble art! I made a smiley face out of a bunch of dark blue marbles. Amusingly, I ran short and used some light blue, translucent marbles at the bottom. This is on a yellow table outside; it was a challenging shoot because the wind swept through and blew the marbles away a couple times. I persevered to compose and capture this, fortunately.
I added contrast through curves, removed the worst dirt specks on the table, and cloned out the umbrella pole that was at the top-left. I’m experimenting with vignetting here: I made the left corners darker, and the right corners brighter, inspired from the less overt gradations in the original photo.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/119, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2006-03-30T15:01:54-05, 2006-03-30_15h01m54
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The dark marbles, with traces of black and purple. This has colder lighting. The stacked marbles contribute to an interesting composition, as does the stray line in the background. I picked marbles that were cracked and weathered, to oppose the smooth perfection of the first photo. This is a sub-par entry in the series because the purples are ugly and without detail, but it’s been in the series for two years so it’s worthy of staying. This new edit is an improvement over the two-year old original.
I set tungsten white balance on this, over-exposing the blues horribly. I had no concept of color back in early 2006, and because this is from a low-end JPEG only camera, the detail is unrecoverable. In the new version above, I darkened the marbles, desaturated the clipped blue hues and cloned in the color of the dark marbles, giving purple, and added contrast. It’s a big step up from the original.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/8, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO100, 2006-03-21T06:46:32-05, 2006-03-21_06h46m32
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The definitive photo of blue marbles. These marbles are my grandmother’s, and the yellow table I arranged them on is on her veranda. I get to take creative shots of them like this, of course. 
The evening light was just right, and while I originally intended to focus on the first marble, having the focus on the second is more nonconforming and gives a sense of depth. I went back into Photoshop today to revamp this February 2006 piece; my editing skills have improved, so I’m finding the above version especially likable.
I added contrast, removed color, and darkened the edges. Unfortunately the blues clip where the light is shining through the marbles, but I toned the colors down anyway, since subtlety is better than garishness, and because the brighter colors look bad in print. There was some dirt on the marbles and table I had to clone out, as always, but I left some on the table so it doesn’t look overly perfect. The finishing touches were to desaturate the yellow hues slightly, and to sharpen and brighten the second marble while blurring the rest of the image. The camera I was using at the time (a Fujifilm FinePix A360) would only focus to 2.4 inches; I got too close so the first one is blurry. I’m liking the depth of field in retrospect, as it seems like the natural choice with the further emphasis of the second marble.
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Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/63, F2.8, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2006-02-22T17:49:43-05, 2006-02-22_17h49m43
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