04 May, 2010

Fooling with a real macro lens

After my brief flirtation with fame and macro Mat offered to bring home his work macro lens for me to play with.  He also brought an extension tube to make it even more macro-y (a technical term I swear!)  I started out this morning trying take photos of our 3 resuced-from-the-garden Monarch butterfly chrysalises on the window sill but that was a dud because I just couldn't hold the camera still enough. I tell you what, if you want to feel reeeeeally old and shaky just try and use a macro without a tripod.  Lesson #1.  Then I tried outside and managed one of a post on our deck - mainly because it was really wide and where the zone of focus was didn't matter so much!

Wood


Then I moved on to a scented geranium in our backyard and that was more successful but still difficult!  I don't know if it was the colour of the flower or the camera or the lens or what but getting the stamen in focus was incredibly hard.  I'm sure *I* wasn't a factor at all :P  The leaves were also kind of fun.  I like how the photos come out looking sort of abstract.

Geraniums


Geranium


Geranium leaf


When I pulled these into Photoshop they looked incredibly saturated which was neat so I left them untouched (the leaf has been cropped a bit) but that's all disappeared now that they're on Flickr. But you can see the details a bit better so it's not all bad!

7 comments:

  1. Wow! I know nothing about photography (its on my list of things to learn someday!) but those photos are gorgeous! I love the second flower and the leaf!

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  2. Jacqui, I love, LOVE everything about your new header!!! Did you design that all yourself? I just love, love it when people can boil down faces to a simple stick figure face, I always think that's sooo charming. And I love the maple leaf tip to Canadia!!!

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  3. the neat thing about a macro lens is that if u shoot a piece of rust its not rusty. its green and red and turquoise blue. and looks like an abstract painting.. an artist i know does his prints up 4ft x 6 ft -huge plywood sized and they're stunning. rust. :)

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  4. You're absolutely right - it sort of takes ordinary things and makes them different, more abstract, more special because you're noticing things about the world around you in a different way. Plus the camera 'sees' things differently than our eyes do. When I look at things this close up it's all in focus, the camera gets so specific by focusing on such a small area.

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  5. Well I'm not sure that I actually look that much like the embroidery, although the hair does sometimes! ;) We use those drawings to represent ourselves in notes etc., I got it from my family where we all had our own little figure. I think mine used to have pigtails at one point too!

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  6. I like the second geranium one the best - nice work!

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