One of the small projects I'm working on in the studio is creating a giant softbox that can be used to generate "sunny window" like light. Of course, being in the basement, our only option is to go artificial, so that's what I did.

The materials were as follows:

• Muslin 108", white
• Two pulleys
• A wooden dowel, 125" thereabouts (I'm not using a wooden dowel, but that's the cheapest route)
• Rope, 550 paracord preferably, but I'm just using a 300lb limit, 30lb working load rope that I got at the Army Surplus store
• Two eyelets
• Two shackles (no need for overkill like mine, which had a working limit of 5000lbs

Setup is pretty simple from there, which can be seen in this picture:

After you are done with getting it all setup, it's a matter of using the rope to bring the dowel all the way to the top and then anchoring both pieces of rope to something solid (a ladder and a stool with a mic stand on it in my case), and you end up with this:

Of course, for it to be fully functional, I'll need to move the screen that is there around, and straighten out the sheet a bit more, but that's a two person job.

Sarah and I went into the studio last night, with her husband, John, to get the studio cleaned up from the flood last week.

All in all, the studio did not suffer much damage from the water, and only small things were ruined because of it. The carpet was salvaged, which was our biggest concern. Also, my strobes are fine with no damage. The only damage I sustained was to the cover for my color matching slate, but the slate itself was fine, so no harm done.

We are at probably about 85% back to working order with some remaining small things to do. We managed to find a way to open up the space a little more by rearranging the "lounge" area, which is awesome because I always felt just a little cramped in there, but now I don't.

Two other improvements we made to the studio, the super softbox, which was an interesting idea of mine. It was to make a giant softbox with the lounge. I hung two pulleys from the ceiling beams, and we now can put the lights in the lounge pointing at a fabric that hangs from the pulleys! How awesome is that?

The second improvement, which is still forthcoming, is the addition of the seamless rollers. Sarah had the brackets, I had the rollers, and so we are set to have very easy to use seamless paper. Yay! Now to just decide on colors to get, and a way of putting the backdrops on the rollers also... I'm still working on the idea for that and will hopefully have that figured out in the short term.

What this means is that I'll be back up and running by next weekend to start doing shoots, which makes my very happy.

Since the site launched yesterday, I've fixed a few things on the site. Most notable being the RSS link in the nav bar (the orange icon), and the addition of the ChangeLog page, which is a pull from the git repository that houses the website code.

Also, I moved my feed to feedburner so I can get analytics for the feed, and google analytics to collect statistics about who is viewing the site. I promise real updates soon.

Today, I launched the new version of my website. It combines my photography portfolio and my blog into a single website, with a single rss feed (coming soon) that shows blog entries and photos as they are added.

Of course, please let me know if you run into any problems. I'll have a number of monthly features that I'm going to try to post including the "favorite photographer" section, videos of aerial or parkour stuff that I'm learning, and any other updates as they come.