If anyone of you is looking for a way to widen the skillset and learn a heap of new things as autodidact, I can only recommend running a conference with an archaeological experiment. It is amazing how many things you can hone on that - including not only computery stuff like database wielding, but also things like photographing.

I spent the day yesterday behind the camera and a photo-tent (for good lighting). In the photo-tent? A sheet of paper with orange millimetre-grid and changing motifs (but all of them similar, and very wooly). And I progressed from photos like this,


when I started fiddling with the settings,



to this as the final result:



All photos are taken with a very long exposure time and a very small aperture to get a high depth of focus. I'm very happy that my camera has a setting exactly for things like that, which means that once I set up the label and wool cop, I only have to press the button once and then wait until the camera on its tripod has taken three pictures with slightly different exposure time...

Today I will take the rest of the photos, which is easy work but more than a bit boring, since the long exposure time means that it takes about two to three minutes for each item to finish. And in that time, I can more or less just stand around and be bored...