The hexadecimal color of today’s soup is #5e2300: spicy, but you can handle it.

Ingredients:

1. Maybe 1 cup of water
2. Maybe 1/3 cup of soy sauce
3. Maybe 1/2 cup of veggie broth
4. Maybe 1/2 cup of chicken broth
5. About 2/3 a container of white button mushrooms
6. Green onion bunch – I could’ve used two bunches
7. A handful of bean sprouts
8. Two tablespoons of red curry paste
9. One teaspoon of chili oil
10. Two tablespoons of crushed garlic
11. Asparagus bunch
12. 2 baby bok choy, 3 if you feel like it
13. A tablespoon of salt

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start a medium heat on the water.
2. Add broth parts.
3. Shake in some soy sauce. Soup’s a little brown at this point.
4. Toss in the bean sprouts.
5. Toss in the mushrooms (I buy them pre-sliced, but slice ‘em if you prefer).
6. Slice up the green onions and toss them in. I probably could’ve used two bunches.
7. I use crushed garlic from a jar. Add two tablespoons from a jar, or 4 crushed cloves.
8. Add two tablespoons of red curry paste and one teaspoon of chili oil.
9. Soup’s reddish brown at this point! And nearly to a boil.
10. While that’s working its way to a boil, chop the asparagus bunch in three parts. Toss in all the pieces *except* for the heads.
11. Quickly chop the bok choy. Toss the white parts in, save the leaves for last.
12. TASTE SOUP RIGOROUSLY! But be careful, it has kick. Add more soy sauce & water if it’s too spicy; add more chili oil if you want more kick.
13. Add about a tablespoon of salt (or skip this step – YMMV).
14. I prefer a balance with more curry and only a tiny bit of chili oil.
15. At the very last minute, throw in the bok choy leaves and the heads of the asparagus.
16. Boil it for maybe two more minutes.

TAH DAH!

This will serve two fairly hungry people. Or one insane lady.

In addition to the usual flurry of wonderful dust and fire activities, this year I will be taking the helm as Balsa Man Regional Lead and Czarina of Tiny Art. Balsa Man is a large celebration of tiny art, and this year there’ll be a regional at the black rock desert in Nevada! A regional is a local event where you can experience some of the same flavor as the Big (or Tiny) Original. The Balsa Man regional takes place at Adapt and 4:00 (that’s playa coordinates), Friday September 4, 5-6pm, black rock desert, Nevada. Balsa Man 2009 takes place at Baker Beach in San Francisco, Saturday, September 5th, 6pm-8:30pm.

One way or the other a good time will be had by all. Contact BRDregional@balsaman.org if you want to get involved either in the cool breezes of San Francisco beach or the hot dry desert of Nevada. Your tiny art is welcome.

I updated www.fireartphotos.com with a better selection of fire photos, and a new design. All the fire spinner photos are up!

I rented some flash equipment so that I could do rear-sync flash photography. Rear sync flash is when the flash fires at the end of a longish exposure rather than at the beginning. The flash fires right before the shutter closes, capturing whatever that image happens to be at that moment in time. Typically it’s used to create motion effects such as a car’s faded image trailing behind the bright “frozen in time” portion of the image. It’s also used in fire spinner photography, to create trails of light/fire around an image of a non-blurry person.

How to set up remote-triggered strobes

I used a Nikon D300 and two strobes, a Speedlight SB-600 and a Speedlight SB-800.

• On the Nikon D300, in the menu settings, I scrolled down to the pencil, Bracketing flash, Flash contrl for built-in flash menu. In that menu, I scrolled down until “Commander mode” was selected.
• Within the “Commander mode” menu, I made sure that Built-in flash was set to M 1/128, and that Group A and Group B were both set to M 1/1. By setting the built-in flash to the lowest power I make sure that most of my light comes from my strobes. Your mileage may vary, this is a matter of taste.
• On the SB-600, in order to get to the Commander mode menu, I held down the Zoom and “-” keys simultaneously. From there I made sure Channel 1 and Group A were selected.
• On the SB-800, in order to get to the Commander mode menu, I held down the Select (center) key for a few seconds. I chose Channel 1 and Group A for this strobe also.
• I then set the Nikon D300 to Rear Sync mode, by holding down the flash menu button to the left of the on-camera flash, and using the scroll wheel until “rear” comes up on the display.
• I set an exposure for 2 seconds, positioned my strobes, and ta dah! The on-board flash goes off, I could hear the shutter open, then 2 seconds later the flashes went off.

What it looks like

The above photo shoes my test with 2 second exposure, and a slave strobe on each side (SB-600 and SB-800). I’m moving a small headlamp around in front of me. Later tonight I’ll test the setup on some fire spinners.