Welcome to the Shuttered Void
Hello, my name is Jeff A. Abbott and I am an amateur experimental photographer.
I recently got back into photography after getting a new camera, but I’ve been around it my whole life. My father was a professional photographer and he used to occupy me by putting a random camera in my hand and telling me to go out and shoot the rest of whatever roll had some leftover frames. When I filled that one up and if he still needed to keep me out of his hair, he’d hand me another and back out I’d go.
I first encountered the caustics photography that I showcase here in late 2025, after I took some test shots out of curiousity of a CMY Cube that I had with an off-camera flash, and was blown away by the effect. From there I learned about dichroic glass and other optical glasses, and have been exploring in several directions since. This site exists in order to document that journey, and I’m glad to have you along with me for it.
If you have any feedback, criticism, praise, or questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Thanks for checking out my pretty pictures, and I hope you like them!
~Jeff
The Tools
Gear
- Canon EOS R50 camera — The main camera. My first mirrorless, it’s a mighty little thing, although I would like to upgrade to an R7 at some point, or something in the R5 lineup.
- Canon RF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens — I mostly just keep the Nifty Fifty on it.
- Canon EOS 70D camera — The secondary camera, I keep it on and tethered alongside the R50 so I can document setups and layouts directly in the photo stream and without having to move the main camera.
- Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens — The kit lens from my ancient Canon EOS Rebel XS (EOS 1000D). It’s good enough for what I’m using it for, I like having a zoom for the behind-the-scenes, and I’m not willing to invest any more money in the EF mount system until I have a good reason to.
- Godox TT685II-C and Neewer TT560 speedlite flashes — I’m starting to build out a Godox system and will be replacing the Neewers with wireless units as time and budget allow.
- Godox X3C wireless trigger — I’ve got this firing the flashes, the Neewers via Godox XR hotshoe receivers, and it’s really snazzy. Wireless is absolutely the way to go for off-camera flash work, even if you’re in a studio setup like mine where everything is stationary.
- MARIGOLD — Asus ZenBook 14 laptop. Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, 32GB RAM, 1TB storage, Intel Arc Graphics. It’s not the best but I got a great deal on it and it has 32GB of memory which was a must for me. This is my Lightroom computer.
- PERIWINKLE — Home-built gaming PC. AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, 128GB RAM, 3TB storage, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super 12GB GPU. I use this beast for Photoshop, Autodesk Fusion and Blender for modeling, OrcaSlicer for 3D printing, and just about everything else I do.
Software & Web
- Adobe Lightroom Classic
- Adobe Photoshop
- Autodesk Fusion
- Blender
- OrcaSlicer
- DreamHost
- WordPress
- MySQL