Finally we get to one of my handy traveling “ducks on stuff” stalwarts, Lumina the light-up duck, star of such events as “Lumina on a Tesla sedan” and others that you can visit via the tag linked below.
Its battery is, sadly, long since depleted and can’t be easily replaced.
What’s amazing about running that webcomic for four years followed by even more years of keeping the ducks stored in plastic bins is that Rei’s signature purple ribbon never tore off or came loose.
This photoshoot used most of the ducks that I keep in an under-the-bed storage bin, and while a lot of those ducks are Quacked Panes regulars, some are just random “seasonal” selections. Here’s one of those.
After years in the storage bins, these ducks got dusty and dingy. Cleaning them up for this photo shoot session took some work; you can tell that what this guy really needed was a proper bath and a scrubbing. The results are plenty sufficient for my purposes, honestly though.
A few years ago I took a picture of the Moon with my then-new Coolpix camera, and it didn’t turn out too badly. Today, thanks to some lovely weather and excellent timing, the opportunity to try that shot with the Lumix FZ80 came up and I couldn’t pass it up. How did the new camera do?
Not too badly, if I’m honest. Mind you, I wish I’d been able to get the remote control app for my camera (yes, such a thing exists) to work properly so I could snap the picture without actually touching the device. Despite the camera being mounted on the tripod, I still introduced a bit of wobble to the results. More’s the pity.
If you compare the two I think the Lumix did a better job, though the Coolpix result was entirely handheld, which is some kind of miracle considering how unsteady my hands are.
The venerable Rusty, one of the stars of the Quacked Panes comic run, was (of course) one of the first ducks I put under the bright lights in the tent. If I couldn’t make this duck look good, what was even the point? He’s a bit the worse for wear (he’s named “Rusty” for a reason after all) but hey, he’ll probably outlive me in the long run.
Mind you, not every picture came out well. I kept tinkering with the camera settings and that made some pictures come out too bright or too dim, and I’m not enough of an image-editing guy to know how to adjust for that without making the final results even worse, so what you see is what I can give.
