It is Monday, autumn and I shoot a macro again. Today’s topic in macro monday is metal – so I chose a drill. And I drilled for light because this was the strangest thing ever I had to light. Whatever you do, you have to live with the highlights, the flares and the unwanted reflections.
One of the days when I know why I love and hate photography.
I tried to shoot another macro but wanted to use a different light. A bunch of paper was used – you can see the edges and lines of the paper.
A white LED was the light source from the left and a laser pointer was used from the top and aimed between the paper.
In post processing I used the tonal contrast filter from Nik Color Efex. This enhanced the edges and enhanced the abstract effect of the picture.
I can imagine this quite good on a wall.
I found these guys when taking a walk on the weekend. as there is a lot of details in this picture I tried to shift the focus to front section. So I added brightness to the top left corner to enhance the flare and reduced the reflections of the roofs. The background was muted by the taking the saturation to 50%. I cranked the warmth of the leaves in the left lower corner up 20%, just enough to recreate what I saw that moment.
I was looking for some projects I can take inside. One of the things I always wanted to do was a burning match macro.
Burning match
The setup was as follows:
There is one thing you should know: I had to clean the UV-Filter I used as a lens protector afterwards. The gases of the burning match head seems to condense on the glass easily.
I always wanted to try the “indian summer” Color filter. Obviously one has to wait for autumn.
Here it is. I played with Nik Color Efex: Indian Summer and then some tonal contrast to emphasize the lines in the leaves.
On our trip to “Blood for blood” we met this restaurated remains of a roman villa. And I cannot drive by any ruins without stopping…
The trusted Magic Lantern took 9 exposures and I used 7.
Still trying to master the 1.4 with manual focusing on my 60D. It seems bad to focus with the liveview. I have seen some good shots and some bad ones but it still hits me like a hammer how shallow DOF can be. The focus lies on the second row of dots on the black die and does not really reach the green one. This is a wonderful and mean piece of old glass 🙂
I finally made my proof of concept: By using Blender I made a time lapse video and applied some virtual dolly movement. Meaning, that the camera is moving across the picture. This is possible due to the bigger than full HD video source made from the single picture recorded with the Canon Powershot S95. A zoom would have been also possible but was not implemented due to calculation time reasons.
Lean back and enjoy
As one doesn’t have theoption to do digital crossprocessing I thought, why not develop a RAW in color and monochrome? I blended the two pictures and the result was quite crossprocessed.
I wrote earlier on about my contact with CHDK and how I tried to do some time lapses. I was fascinated how easy this technique is and how powerful the visualizations are. I had my first failures and I did some of them again. I will return to this point at the end.
