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This morning I spent some time splitting the beam so I could light the cat with a raw beam. It looks really good in laser light and the splitting only increased the exposure time by 2 seconds. Unfortunately I forgot to equalize the beam paths (one of these days someone will come out with a stabilized diode laser that doesn't cost three arms and I'm going to dump HeNe and never look back) and the image is quite dim because of that. In transmission mode under white light it practically blazes though. Ahh well, time to get to work. Had loads of time today to to run another few tests with the stone and then switched to snoopy for a final transmission test. Things are looking very good and ready for some serious hologrammage(tm). One side benefit of using an overhead setup is the space savings on the table. I'm using barely half of it which should leave the rest for a copy setup. After another few holograms I'll finalize the setup and attempt to set up my second laser for making copies. Pictures forthcoming. It's been a good couple of days for hologramming. I've made a couple of snoopygrams (my porcelain cat) in transmission mode and the last was a three-beam version that came out very bright. So, with that hologram in-hand it's time to turn to making the hologram for the next PCG Gathering in November. I've got a couple of good subjects and a potential scene layed out and in testing. This evening I did a test shot that came out good and I'm going to continue to work on the lighting and scene layout until I've got my final shot. I've thought about "storyboarding" the layout but it's really simple enough that I can keep it in my head. The real issue is if the multiple exposures will come out as I envision. Time will tell but I won't be giving out any details until after November 14th. :-) This morning I had just enough time to add another beam to the scene to light up the [censored]'s [censored]. I simply split off part of one object beam just behind the primary object beamsplitter and directed it straight back at the object without expanding the beam through a lens. Looks good but isn't quite what I want. I'm not going to go into more detail just because the censors would limit what I say anyway :-) I've been making various preparations for mastering the pcg hologram as well as making additional optics mounts for a copy setup. The setup may be a bit cramped but if I can make it work it means that I can have both a master and copy setup going at the same time. Here are some pictures that have been censored until after the PCG Gathering.
The master for the PCG hologram is done and I've been working on a hologram for a friend. Here are some pictures.
I've recently been filling up my table with a forest of mounts and several of my purchased (shop-type) and home-made bases were a bit wobbly, the enemy of stability. For the shop bases I initially started leveling them with a method used for sharpening chisels. Get a piece of float glass or marble, attach a piece of sandpaper to it and sand the bottom of the base until it's flat. That worked well enough but took too long. I then thought that perhaps I could use jb-weld (which I have a few boxes of after building my new table) as a filler which would level the base. I took a piece of marble and spread a sheet of wax paper over the top. After mixing the jb-weld I spread a thin bead along the "skids" of the base and then lightly spread it so that it covered the skid completely. I then put the base on the wax paper and pressed down to both even out and thin out the layer of epoxy. Let it cure overnight and it's a snap to remove the mount from the wax paper. You end up with a nice smooth and slightly waxy bottom that once in-place on the table, doesn't want to move and won't wobble as long as your table is reasonably flat.
There was also a discussion of extending scenes past the lasers coherence length and I took tome time to do a (not to scale, but representative) drawing of my current setup. The first object is 4" behind the plate and the leg extending from the first beam splitter to the right mirror is 55" long from bs along the beam to the plate. The second object is 7" behind the plate and the leg extending from the first beam splitter to the left mirror is also 55" long from bs along the beam to the plate.
One thing that can't be shown in the drawing is that while most of the beams are parallel to the table, the right object beam and reference beams are actually angled above the table. The beam comes out of the laser 8" above the table and the collimating mirror and right object mirror are 18" and 25" above the table, respectively. In case you're wondering, yes, I have a half-wave plate rotating my object beam so that it's p-polarized with respect to the plate.
In-progress on the other half of the table is a copy setup. With luck I'll be making copies tomorrow.
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