Showing posts with label macro photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label macro photography. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Wee men and a Telephone
Was doing a bit of clearing out today and found an old corded phone handset. Just happened to have my box of little people on the table at the same time. An hour later, I got back to work.
Friday, 28 December 2012
Creationism
Another bargain buy while shopping with the kids in the post-Xmas sales - a bag of dinosaurs which came complete with some trees and a plastic rock. Seemed like a good excuse for a meditation on the creationist argument.
Father Martin's arguments on creationism just got a wee bit surreal
Tuesday, 25 December 2012
Christmas Buckie
In between prepping the family Xmas dinner and cleaning the house, I came across a bottle of the infamous Buckfast tonic wine, drink of choice for the young and the desperate. The fact that this rather lethal concoction (15%) is really made by the Benedictine Monks of Buckfast Abbey never ceases to amuse me. Having just taken delivery of a set of miniature monks, the rest, as they say, was history.
On a slightly different tack, I'd like to wish you all a very happy Christmas and can't wait to see who got a new camera from Santa. Happy snapping folks, happy snapping!
Product testing and quality control, Buckfast Abbey
On a slightly different tack, I'd like to wish you all a very happy Christmas and can't wait to see who got a new camera from Santa. Happy snapping folks, happy snapping!
Friday, 30 November 2012
Wee Men in the Kitchen
Had a hour to kill and decided to get the wee men out this evening and play with them on the kitchen table.
This is a pretty straight copy of a shot I'd seen done in a book called 52 Photo Ideas (I think). I felt better for doing this. Wee men, concentration, thinking about narrative.
The carrots didn't make it to dinner sadly. Neither did the dog.
This is a pretty straight copy of a shot I'd seen done in a book called 52 Photo Ideas (I think). I felt better for doing this. Wee men, concentration, thinking about narrative.
Monday, 26 November 2012
Love Hearts
Hadn't seen Love Heart sweets for years until I was given some for my 50th birthday last week. I was munching my way through the last packet when I had the idea of doing something with the sweets and the wee men. And here it is.
Well, it seemed like a good fit.
Well, it seemed like a good fit.
Sunday, 15 April 2012
367-50 Week 22
Week 22. Who would have thought it. It's the Easter holidays - dead space. I'm looking forward to seeing some prints I've ordered, with one eye on the judging for the City of Belfast Photographic Society annual exhibition. I fear that I have way too many portrait shots and not enough for the landscape and general sections and too many colour shots, not enough black and white. Anyhow.....here's this week's shots.
It was a very dull Easter Monday for the annual jaunt to Donaghadee. Old home town and all that. Except there's a reason why I only visit once a year. I think the notion of retiring there has gone off me. I couldn't stand it. Or perhaps Donaghadee couldn't stand me. Either way, the only way I could make the trip (and the photo's) look interesting way to resort to cheap post-processing trickery. Or HDR as it's also known.
Easter Tuesday and yet another dull and grey day. We took advantage of a free photoshoot at the new studio in Jessops (although studio is a bit of a grand title for a room with a light box set-up) and then headed off for a bite of lunch. Outside the cafe was the "pop up" MAC with it's rainbow coloured shutters. I hung about for a while but didn't get too many decent shots. This is maybe the best of a poor selection. One to bear in mind perhaps for a rainy day.
This is the engine of my car. It's still quite nice and new under the bonnet, not that I'm under there that often. Today's excuse was getting a small boy to fit a new headlight bulb - way to go Halfords, Boucher Road. I keep forgetting that for some strange Scandinavian reason, my car has five cylinders - that's right - count them. 5. God knows why.
Miniature daffodils shot with the Lensbaby with a 0.4 macro lens screwed on the front. A package of Lensbaby accessories arrived today via Amazon. Macro lenses, wide-angle lens, telephoto lens and a creative aperture kit. Lots of playing ahead. I'm liking the Lensbaby but suspect there's a lot more practice needed due to the hit and miss and fully manual nature of the Lensbaby.
Three small girls on a trampoline - who could resist that sort of photo opportunity? Given that I'd spent the whole day getting prints ready for our annula exhibition judging tomorrow morning I was fairly hacked off with photos. But, as I said, who could resist?
This was the picture which did best for me today at the exhibition judging. I had entered this in a competition last year to be included alongside some of Carrie Davenport's music photography at the Ulster Hall and was chuffed to have it chosen. I then submitted in in a NIPA round and had it rubbished by a very conservative judge. Anyhow, I thought I'd give it a rattle again for the exhibition since it's a shot that I have a lot of affection for. It's actually an old picture, taken in 2010 with my previous camera (Nikon D80). I reprocessed the shot using a few more tweaks to convert it to black and white, which gave it a fuller range of tones than in the original version.
This was supposed to be a ladybird. I was working in the front garden when I spotted the first ladybird of the year. I dashed inside for my camera but by the time I got the Lensbaby attached and screwed in the x4 and x10 macro lenses the ladybird had (quite literally) flown away home. However, a rather large bumble bee arrived and was happy to pose for a few shots. More entertainment for the neighbours who found me lying face down on the lawn apparently pointing my camera at the grass.
9/04/12
It was a very dull Easter Monday for the annual jaunt to Donaghadee. Old home town and all that. Except there's a reason why I only visit once a year. I think the notion of retiring there has gone off me. I couldn't stand it. Or perhaps Donaghadee couldn't stand me. Either way, the only way I could make the trip (and the photo's) look interesting way to resort to cheap post-processing trickery. Or HDR as it's also known.
10/04/12
Easter Tuesday and yet another dull and grey day. We took advantage of a free photoshoot at the new studio in Jessops (although studio is a bit of a grand title for a room with a light box set-up) and then headed off for a bite of lunch. Outside the cafe was the "pop up" MAC with it's rainbow coloured shutters. I hung about for a while but didn't get too many decent shots. This is maybe the best of a poor selection. One to bear in mind perhaps for a rainy day.
11/04/12
This is the engine of my car. It's still quite nice and new under the bonnet, not that I'm under there that often. Today's excuse was getting a small boy to fit a new headlight bulb - way to go Halfords, Boucher Road. I keep forgetting that for some strange Scandinavian reason, my car has five cylinders - that's right - count them. 5. God knows why.
12/04/12
Miniature daffodils shot with the Lensbaby with a 0.4 macro lens screwed on the front. A package of Lensbaby accessories arrived today via Amazon. Macro lenses, wide-angle lens, telephoto lens and a creative aperture kit. Lots of playing ahead. I'm liking the Lensbaby but suspect there's a lot more practice needed due to the hit and miss and fully manual nature of the Lensbaby.
13/04/12
Three small girls on a trampoline - who could resist that sort of photo opportunity? Given that I'd spent the whole day getting prints ready for our annula exhibition judging tomorrow morning I was fairly hacked off with photos. But, as I said, who could resist?
14/04/12
This was the picture which did best for me today at the exhibition judging. I had entered this in a competition last year to be included alongside some of Carrie Davenport's music photography at the Ulster Hall and was chuffed to have it chosen. I then submitted in in a NIPA round and had it rubbished by a very conservative judge. Anyhow, I thought I'd give it a rattle again for the exhibition since it's a shot that I have a lot of affection for. It's actually an old picture, taken in 2010 with my previous camera (Nikon D80). I reprocessed the shot using a few more tweaks to convert it to black and white, which gave it a fuller range of tones than in the original version.
15/04/12
This was supposed to be a ladybird. I was working in the front garden when I spotted the first ladybird of the year. I dashed inside for my camera but by the time I got the Lensbaby attached and screwed in the x4 and x10 macro lenses the ladybird had (quite literally) flown away home. However, a rather large bumble bee arrived and was happy to pose for a few shots. More entertainment for the neighbours who found me lying face down on the lawn apparently pointing my camera at the grass.
Sunday, 8 April 2012
367-50 Week 21
Back to butts this week. Not much of an exotic nature to share this week but some strange happenings indeed to recount.
Today was our first wedding anniversary. I came home to find this rather excellent toilet paper installation in the living room, courtesy of Lynsey, Hannah, Maud and Roy. It was then I figured out that the first wedding anniversary is "paper" and realised that I'd got Trish a bunch of flowers. Whoops.
And here are the flowers in question. I started playing about with my Lensbaby although the light was very limited in the kitchen. I'm not always sure when using manual focus if my shots are sharp - part of being a little short-sighted I suppose. Even with the dioptre on my camera set properly it can still be a little hit and miss. The ability to shift the sweet spot on the Lensbaby Composer is a nice feature and I pushed it over the the left of the frame for this short. I think there might be some fun to be had with this little bit of kit. Perhaps a themed week on the blog is in the works?
I knew that going to camera club AGM was a bad idea. Trish had indicated that after 3 years that she wanted to step down as President. I knew that no-one else would want to do it but wasn't expected to be ambushed into standing for the post. So there we have it - I am now President of the City of Belfast Photographic Society and here's my chain of office to prove it. In reality this means that the above item has moved from Trish's underwear drawer to my underwear drawer. I'm still in shock.
After last night's AGM at the camera club and my shock investiture as El Presidente I decided that it would only be right to have a presidential portrait taken. I made an effort and put on a shirt and tie and felt that the cigar and trust-worthy expression would be just the ticket.
Keeping the theme of self-portraits, I shot this today after picking up a second hand Nikon 60mm f2.8D lens. Supposed to be very sharp and good for portraits and macro work. Been playing about with it this afternoon. The depth of field is a little out in this shot - My eye is sharp but the camera is way too soft for my liking - but then again I was shooting it "wide open" at f2.8 into a mirror. More playing to come. The lens is really solid and seems very well-built. Autofocus is fast and accurate but doesn't have full-time manual over-ride and getting in into manual mode is fiddly. It also claims to close down to an f-stop of f32 which I've never seen before. I shall give it a try.
Still playing about with the new 60mm micro lens. There are two of these novelty bottles sitting on the kitchen window sill and I was just shooting close up with the new lens to see how it performed in terms of macro work. It does pretty well, although you do need to get very close with a 60mm my 105mm macro lens gives a bit more room to work in. Anyhow - nice and sharp and the colours are good.
2/04/12
Today was our first wedding anniversary. I came home to find this rather excellent toilet paper installation in the living room, courtesy of Lynsey, Hannah, Maud and Roy. It was then I figured out that the first wedding anniversary is "paper" and realised that I'd got Trish a bunch of flowers. Whoops.
3/04/12
And here are the flowers in question. I started playing about with my Lensbaby although the light was very limited in the kitchen. I'm not always sure when using manual focus if my shots are sharp - part of being a little short-sighted I suppose. Even with the dioptre on my camera set properly it can still be a little hit and miss. The ability to shift the sweet spot on the Lensbaby Composer is a nice feature and I pushed it over the the left of the frame for this short. I think there might be some fun to be had with this little bit of kit. Perhaps a themed week on the blog is in the works?
4/04/12
I knew that going to camera club AGM was a bad idea. Trish had indicated that after 3 years that she wanted to step down as President. I knew that no-one else would want to do it but wasn't expected to be ambushed into standing for the post. So there we have it - I am now President of the City of Belfast Photographic Society and here's my chain of office to prove it. In reality this means that the above item has moved from Trish's underwear drawer to my underwear drawer. I'm still in shock.
5/04/12
After last night's AGM at the camera club and my shock investiture as El Presidente I decided that it would only be right to have a presidential portrait taken. I made an effort and put on a shirt and tie and felt that the cigar and trust-worthy expression would be just the ticket.
6/04/12
Keeping the theme of self-portraits, I shot this today after picking up a second hand Nikon 60mm f2.8D lens. Supposed to be very sharp and good for portraits and macro work. Been playing about with it this afternoon. The depth of field is a little out in this shot - My eye is sharp but the camera is way too soft for my liking - but then again I was shooting it "wide open" at f2.8 into a mirror. More playing to come. The lens is really solid and seems very well-built. Autofocus is fast and accurate but doesn't have full-time manual over-ride and getting in into manual mode is fiddly. It also claims to close down to an f-stop of f32 which I've never seen before. I shall give it a try.
7/04/12
Still playing about with the new 60mm micro lens. There are two of these novelty bottles sitting on the kitchen window sill and I was just shooting close up with the new lens to see how it performed in terms of macro work. It does pretty well, although you do need to get very close with a 60mm my 105mm macro lens gives a bit more room to work in. Anyhow - nice and sharp and the colours are good.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
367-50 Week 1
Got my 367-50 project started this Tuesday on my birthday. Seems fitting that my first picture is birthday-related, so I've selected a shot of the birthday cake my work colleagues got for me. Note the bad spelling; what do you ecpect from a bunch of Educational Psychologists?
The next shot is my in-car picnic. Due to the nature of my work, It's not easy to take photos that show what I do during the working day. One of the things I find myself doing is having picnics in the car, between visits or as an excuse to get out of the office for a while. This was more up-market than usual, as I had been into the Tower Centre in Ballymena and got some grub from M&S and a couple of books from Waterstones. Ate this sitting in The People's Park, reading my books.
Next picture is just a macro shot of my favourite Rizla liquorice rolling papers. Thanks to Lynsey, I have a good dozen packs of these at home - they're hard to get anywhere except Tesco.
My fascination for miniature figures has grown, and I was delighted to stumble across Slinkachu's work and his book "Little People in the City." I ordered up some more figures from Amazon and they arrived this afternoon. Slinkachu's work made me think more about having some sort of narrative for my pictures and about the context for these. This was my first effort with some tiny businessmen. I tried to make it look like something was happening, and used my laptop screen with a spreadsheet as the out of focus background.
Saturday brought an onset of DIY (my personal nemesis) and Trish and I finally got round to taking down the huge kitchen cupboard that existed in order to give me something to bang my head on. After nearly killing ourselves (yes, the huge heavy cupboard was only held up with two screws) it all went smoothly and after a trip to IKEA we got our shelf, lights and picture frames up. Now we have to agree on what pictures to put in the frames. I also had an excuse to get some of my family pictures out of storage and onto the top of the shelf.
Finally around to today's picture. Got the little businessmen out again, and spent some time thinking about narratvie and context before switching my camera on. Trish has pointed out that about a year ago, I would have described any talk of "narrative and context" as pretentious wank. Which it probably is - apologies. I think this set worked out better than the earlier shot above - the narrative is better?
That's my first week of taking a picture every day. I'm still not into carrying my D90 everywhere with me, hence the pictures from the iPhone. So far, so good. 6 shots down, 361 to go!
15/11/11
The next shot is my in-car picnic. Due to the nature of my work, It's not easy to take photos that show what I do during the working day. One of the things I find myself doing is having picnics in the car, between visits or as an excuse to get out of the office for a while. This was more up-market than usual, as I had been into the Tower Centre in Ballymena and got some grub from M&S and a couple of books from Waterstones. Ate this sitting in The People's Park, reading my books.
16/11/11
Next picture is just a macro shot of my favourite Rizla liquorice rolling papers. Thanks to Lynsey, I have a good dozen packs of these at home - they're hard to get anywhere except Tesco.
17/11/11
My fascination for miniature figures has grown, and I was delighted to stumble across Slinkachu's work and his book "Little People in the City." I ordered up some more figures from Amazon and they arrived this afternoon. Slinkachu's work made me think more about having some sort of narrative for my pictures and about the context for these. This was my first effort with some tiny businessmen. I tried to make it look like something was happening, and used my laptop screen with a spreadsheet as the out of focus background.
18/11/11
19/11/11
Finally around to today's picture. Got the little businessmen out again, and spent some time thinking about narratvie and context before switching my camera on. Trish has pointed out that about a year ago, I would have described any talk of "narrative and context" as pretentious wank. Which it probably is - apologies. I think this set worked out better than the earlier shot above - the narrative is better?
20/11/11
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
The Ring Shot
Damn but I'm spending too much time on macro photography at the moment. Saw this little shot done in an e-book and decided to give it a go. So easy and a lovely effect:
To do this you need a desk lamp (set behind and above the book and ring), a hard-back book (paper backs don't seem to sit just as nicely) and your camera on a tripod. As always the Sigma 105mm macro lens was used and set on aperture priority with an f-stop around 5.6 for quite shallow depth of field. This gave me a shutter speed of 1/100 at ISO 200. The narrow depth of field worked well for keeping the text blurred front and back and focusing the eye on the ring and the heart-shaped shadow. No image manipulation used - colours adjusted in Lightroom, cropped and a little dark vignette in the corners.
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Railway men and Macro
I'd seen a few shots lately of little railway figures used in a variety of settings for macro photography. The one that caught my eye was a cracking shot of a a little hunter with his rifle raised facing an oncoming (full-size snail). I tried to re-create this shot, but failed due to a non-cooperating snail. I therefore retreated to the kitchen armed with a set of mountain climbers and hunters/lumberjacks. I found a large slice of left-over chocolate birthday cake for the climbers and then found I had to chop a butternut squash for dinner - time to call in my own miniature lumberjacks.
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Sunflower plus Insects plus sunshine = macro photography
After the rain stopped this morning and after I'd put in about five hours of paperwork, the sun came out. I saw the sunflower out of the window and eventually got my stuff together to go out and shoot some pics. Gear was my trusty Nikon D90, Sigma 105mm 1:2.8 DG Macro lens, cheap korean IR remote release and Vanguard Alto tripod.
Lots of happy little hoverflies about, although getting their wings sharp was a bugger. Generally I was getting shutter speeds of 1/200 with an f-stop around 5.6-6.3 at ISO 200.
Liked the little shimmering green fly. Bees were hard to get a good shot of. Getting them sharp front to back was impossible, although looking at close-ups of their pollen-covered beards when zoomed in was quite interesting.
Good stuff all round, and a good excuse to sit in the sun, drink coffee, smoke fags and take some pictures.
A Macro extender perhaps for the next time?
Lots of happy little hoverflies about, although getting their wings sharp was a bugger. Generally I was getting shutter speeds of 1/200 with an f-stop around 5.6-6.3 at ISO 200.
Good stuff all round, and a good excuse to sit in the sun, drink coffee, smoke fags and take some pictures.
A Macro extender perhaps for the next time?
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Guitar Stuff
Had been thinking about ideas for Triptych shots/pictures and began thinking about using one of my guitars (I have three and can't play any of them that well). The electric I have is a rather pretty PRS SE Singlecut with a eye-catching stripy blue finish - it got the nod.
I was lucky enough to get hold of a set of studio lights and did nothing fancier than turn them on to constant and then adjust camera exposure accordingly. Kit was my D90, Sigma 105mm and Nikon 50mm prime lenses.
Problems cropped up. First set of shots I did I had forgotten to lower my ISO from the ridiculously high settings when I last used my camera, so pictures looked fine in camera but when zoomed in, grainy as a grainy thing.
The biggest problem was dust. I cleaned and polished the guitar and it was still covered in dust which was very obvious when taking close shots with the 105mm lens. I took a damp cloth to it and guess what - still specks of dust. At that point I took the coward's way out and cloned as many dust specks out on my computer.
As for the Triptych idea, I decided on a picture of the bridge/pickups and the two pictures above of the switch and knobs with the reflections in the body of the guitar. After several abortive attempts with Photoshop, I gave up and printed all three separately to mount individually.
I was lucky enough to get hold of a set of studio lights and did nothing fancier than turn them on to constant and then adjust camera exposure accordingly. Kit was my D90, Sigma 105mm and Nikon 50mm prime lenses.
Problems cropped up. First set of shots I did I had forgotten to lower my ISO from the ridiculously high settings when I last used my camera, so pictures looked fine in camera but when zoomed in, grainy as a grainy thing.
The biggest problem was dust. I cleaned and polished the guitar and it was still covered in dust which was very obvious when taking close shots with the 105mm lens. I took a damp cloth to it and guess what - still specks of dust. At that point I took the coward's way out and cloned as many dust specks out on my computer.
As for the Triptych idea, I decided on a picture of the bridge/pickups and the two pictures above of the switch and knobs with the reflections in the body of the guitar. After several abortive attempts with Photoshop, I gave up and printed all three separately to mount individually.
Monday, 15 November 2010
Return of the Macro
An hour to spare and the house to myself, so out came the Sigma 105mm, tripod and dinosaur of a flashgun connected to a remote cable. I had been looking at a little wooden Buddha I've owned for many years and which spent a long time being exposed to the elements in the garden as a result of being pushed around in a doll's buggy by my youngest. Poor old Buddha stood the test of this abuse and actually looks quite well, all things considered.
I was interested in seeing if I could capture the grain on this little wooden statue. After a bit of playing about I ended up with a table lamp on one side for constant light and a bounced flash on the other side to fill in the shadows and still preserve some detail. Pretty pleased with the results overall.
I was interested in seeing if I could capture the grain on this little wooden statue. After a bit of playing about I ended up with a table lamp on one side for constant light and a bounced flash on the other side to fill in the shadows and still preserve some detail. Pretty pleased with the results overall.
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