November – Right. Crappy weather busy at work and aside from the Football I don’t think I’ve taken a photo for fun for months.
Someone on the talkphotography forums had asked a few questions about Kenko Tubes so I dragged mine out of the bag and had a play….
Nothing special but not a bad result for 10 minutes titting about. The one with the flash underneath will be interesting to play with and try to recover some of the stamen detail…..
Imagine my delight when the humdrum and otherwise normal Thursday evening of pointless TV was interrupted by the discovery of a dead fly.
Armed with the off camera flash, wireless triggers ant a 12mm Kenko Tube, I first drew some stick like pictures and posed the corpse. You know the stuff, staircases, horses etc.
None of these were particularly good, so I just tried different angles for the flash, at different power settings until I came up with this.
Can’t be bothered to do much processing so you get it here in all it’s dead, and decaying glory….. Quite like the ‘expression on it’s poor dead face.
Following on from the plain droplet shots I found myself with another spare few minutes and tried something completely new…..
Learned quite a bit.
1) clean the glass, then clean it again
2) Frozen peas don’t make much of a splash
3) trying to drop things in a glass of water and photograph them at the same time is tricky
3) clean the glass, then clean the glass again
4) clean the glass
5) Bubbles form in the water without dropping anything in – nuisance.
6) Clean the glass.
I’ve seen quite a few shots recently involving playing cards and motion blur so though I’d have a go myself having borrowed a rather nice Manfrotto Tripod from a friend. I didn’t realise how hard this is to do by yourself !! – For those interested, the Flash was bounced off of the ceiling, and the exposure was metered for the ambient light minus around 1 stop.
Multiple test shots gave me a resultant shutter speed of 1/5 @ f6.3 which captured the movement of the cards quite nicely when I was able to get the timing right. Keeping an eye on the timer, and making sure the cards are within the frame was rather tricky, and I only ended up with two usable shots from 20 or so attempts
Sadly, my living room is too small to not have included the wall in the shot. I already had to clone out a bit of sofa behind me. This for me, makes this shot pretty much just below average, but at least it’s good practice. I thought about trying to remove the wall by copying or cloning in more floor, but my PS skills fall way too short to even attempt it.
Added to the list of shots to re-try properly at some point this year.
If that’s true, then my windows need cleaning or I have no soul. This was another one of those, what shall I do now moments. So I attached the nifty fifty to the 30D, stuck in 24mm of extension tubes and wobbled back and forth in front of the lens with the camera remote in hand. Out of 10 or so shots, this one was the only one nearly in focus.
eye macro photo by dave frost
I guess I’ll be getting bored with the macro shots shortly so will have some “proper” photos up here again before the end of the month !!