Circuit Playground BlueFruit LED light strip

I don't tinker as much as I'd like. I usually get distracted surfing the web or playing Civ 6 games. Finally got around to trying to build one of these:

https://learn.adafruit.com/easy-no-solder-bluetooth-controlled-room-lights

Basically take a Circuit Playground Bluefruit - https://www.adafruit.com/product/4333 and a strip of neopixels and you can control them with the adafruit BlueFruit app on your phone.

So it's super easy, requires no soldering (as the project title suggests) and turns out pretty cool.  

Anyway finally got one in.  I burned out one of my bluefruits in the process.  I wired it upside down *AND* used a 12v power supply by mistake.  YIKES!  Smoked it right up.  Going to have to buy another to replace it.  

Side-note the crayon containers from Micheals (or JoAnn or the other craft stores) are fantastic for storing these things (you can see some on my messy desk)

Photo Challenge week 3 - Black And White

 

Week three - Take a black and white photo of any subject you want.

I love how vivid the details turn out in this shot when I was just goofing around. 

It's even more interesting when you remove the background - it looks like a drawing.  I need to clean up some spots around the ears, the auto select tool did good, but not perfect. 

So now I just need to try this again, but next time I want to try a person and get one of those black and white portrait photos that show details like skin tone.  Like the cover shot in this article: https://iso.500px.com/35-fantastic-black-and-white-portraits-on-500px/

So this catches me back up - next week is 'Warmth' - not sure what I'm going to do yet.

Photo Challenge week 2 - Rule of Thirds and getting back on track

So I put the photo challenge on pause.  I knew I was getting a new lens for Christmas and wanted to wait for that.  Anyway I finally got back out and started up again last week. The photo prompt is "Rule of Thirds Motion" - Use the Rule of Thirds to show Motion on your picture.  So here's the concept I want to do:

So that's the best of the shots I took.  I hate it. There's a lot of problems with it and I'll probably try and take it again. The first issue is I'm on the wrong side of the trail, the sun is just out of frame giving me awkward lighting. (it's where the bench I could sit on was located and it's a 30' drop on the other side of the trail. The second issue is it was cold - so very few people on the trail so I didn't have a lot of candidates to shoot.  I like the idea - set the shutter speed slow to blur the runner or rider.  Another version I might give a shot is a bench near my house that's on a busy street - see if I can get the lights to blur as the car drives by.   

Anyway wanted to get back to putting these pictures up to force myself to take more photos so I can get better.