Salvage Silicon for Surreal Cityscapes - a fresh idea for macro photographers

Salvage Silicon - Show Notes

Hello all and welcome back to @Allan Walls Photography.

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This is not actually a photography video - it is more of a tutorial on how to destroy perfectly good electronic devices, just to get your hands on one or two tiny slivers of silicon. To photograph. It isn’t any where near as difficult or complicated as I make it look, but you should be very careful, nonetheless. Don’t mess with electronics that have been plugged in at any time in, say, a year. And even then, treat capacitors as if they are fully charged. If you don’t know what a capacitor is, don’t tackle this project. I will send you a chip to photograph.

Good quality, mint condition silicon microprocessor chips (is that an oxymoron?) make for some of the most fascinating macro photography subjects, in their own right. They are also the best tool for testing lenses and objective at high magnification. For this alone, it is a good idea to have a couple sitting around. You can buy them, but they are pretty expensive. I just take any electronic junk that I can find at garage sales or in thrift stores and break them down for parts. Old (but not too old) computers are best, but almost everything will have one or two. They only invented these chips in 1971, when I was four, so gasoline-powered computers from the 1920s will not have any chips inside. Mice, maybe, but chips, no.

In this rigorously scientific video, I will show you how to use a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and an over-clocked hair drier to harvest this semi-conducting bounty. I will even show you how to pry open the macadamia nut-like epoxy packages to get to the gold. I also share with you everything that I know about electronics and computers (the remaining 29 minutes of the video are just filler).

Have fun with this cool project and please be careful

Видео Salvage Silicon for Surreal Cityscapes - a fresh idea for macro photographers канала Allan Walls Photography