Hooks and eyes sewn on a display card.

Ok. The plan for this week’s Macro Mondays Eye(s) theme was a simple one: avoid irises and needles. (The impressive thing about this was that there was a plan! Probably never again lol)

A rummage in the sewing drawer (not my usual territory) revealed that there were hooks and bars as well as hooks and eyes. For an average male this is confusing but educational!

This is an old card of black hooks and eyes in quite a small gauge. They’re probably vintage by now and used to be my mother’s. There are two rows each of a dozen that are sewn with white thread onto a pink card for display in the shop.

The rows have a centimetre gap between them if you would like a sense of scale.

I tried taking shots with all sorts of variations of orientation, angle and height of view, depth of field and point of focus. In all I took about seventy images. This is one of the more interesting ones.

I like the vertical bow-tie focus blur effects and the twofold repetition. I guess they look like eyes too, at least when seen from afar after a couple of glasses of red wine… ...well perhaps not (note to self: try more wine next time).

I hope you enjoy it anyway. Thanks very much for dropping by and looking. You’re always welcome. HMM!

[Taken in strong daylight from the left and skylight above with some infill from a white card on right. Tripod; delayed shutter. Processed a high-key from raw, colour boost, cropped and straightened, white vignette in LR; sharpened with Topaz Detail in PS; sheared to correct geometry in Affinity Photo; metadata in iMatch and published to Flickr from LR.]

Tags:   hook blur macro pink bokeh focus black Eye(s) eye Macro Mondays hooks and eyes sewing

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Rifle muzzle and sights.

This is the threatening end of a 45 year-old Webley-Scott .22 air rifle. Although it’s hardly the criminal’s weapon of choice it does have the potential to be a lethal weapon.

I thought at least that it conveyed the menace of guns in the wrong hands for the Macro Mondays Crime theme this week. I liked the textures and corrosion too and, hey, it’s a piece of engineering ;)

The barrel and the front sights are about an inch high with the sights being set back an inch or so along the barrel, hence the slight focus blur.

Hope you enjoy the image anyway. Thanks for passing by taking time to look.

[Taken indoors on my dining table with a tungsten desk lamp about a foot to the right and slightly in front of the rifle. I used black card to shade most of the rifle from the light and a black cloth to hide the background. Tripod & delayed release. Basic darkroom development in LR, cleaned up dust in PS, sharpened in Topaz Detail and then taken back into LR for split toning using blue-green and russet-orange to make a complementary bichrome image (if that is the right term for it!). Metadata in iMatch and then published to Flickr from LR.]

Tags:   cirlce threat danger sights steel texture Crime barrel gun split tone corrosion Macro Mondays opening blue/orange

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Glitter sticks from a moving camera.

Well this was fun. Having looked at Janet Towbin’s useful examples for the Intentional Blur theme for the Macro Mondays group I decided to try creating the rotational tunnel effect image style. But how do you do it in a moving macro? And so the challenges began! And what fun they were.

The first problem with this sort of image is that I needed to get the subject rotating around the axis of the lens, and with a fair degree (sorry – unintentional pun, lol) of turning. Being confident of a low chance of success I also wanted a process which as repeatable as possible so I could experiment. I decided to use the moving camera approach. But that created its own problems too.

This image was done with Little-Ickle camera on its back in the centre of my HiFi deck. Speed was set to Long Play (aka 33 1/3 rpm for those not currently imbued with ancient wisdom). Singles speed (45 rpm) would have probably been better as you can see from this shot – it would have achieved a more complete arc for the slowest shutter speed that Little-Ickle could cope with under these conditions – around 1 second. (But the camera might have fallen over ;) ). This camera had the advantages that it was light enough not to damage the deck and could focus relatively closely so I didn’t have to stand on a ladder.

How to trigger the shutter on a spinning camera and review the results? Well Little-Ickle solved this too: just connect to Wi-Fi and trigger and review from a tablet app! Woohoo: it worked surprisingly well :)

Next the subject. Something small with highlights and bright colours. So I used cocktail glitter sticks (the ones that look like witch’s broom but with tinsel strips rather than twigs). They came in bright colours – green, blue and magenta are used in this shot. I found it best to hold the sticks horizontally and to keep them still (twizzling them created lots of dots rather than concentric stripes). The total subject size across this image is, I guess, between 2 and 3 inches. I was trying to get it within the guidelines by keeping the sticks close to the lens. Little-Ickle, poor challenged thing, tried manfully with autofocus and did surprisingly well though clearly (sorry again!) there was a lot of focus blur on some parts.

Lighting was solved by using a table lamp with a clear bulb to provide sharp highlights. There was a fair bit of ambient daylight around too so I used a black cloth over everything including me. Just glad the neighbours didn’t look in the window…

In all I took 175 shots and could have happily gone on. About 50% were total rejects and the rest had some merit. About 15% were suitable for straightforward processing. They were very varied and all said something different. This shot is one of the more colourful ones and is in a group which look like alien eyes because they have a sort of shine in them, I know not why. I may publish some of the others if there is any interest.

Processing was straightforward: just emphasised the colours and contrast, reducing the black point to deal with the ambient light (all simple slider stuff in LR). Little-Ickle creates quite a bit of noise at this shutter speed (look at the image enlarged) so I tried to tone it down a little causing some minor softening, but in every other respect the blurring of the image was totally in camera.

Thank you so much for looking and reading (award yourself a Smartie for endurance if you’ve got this far lol).

[Processed in LR with slight colour/contrast boost in Topaz Adjust.]

PS I have published some of the others in the Alien Ocular Set album.

Tags:   watching symmetircal tunnel abstract circular jitter intriguing circle magenta blue ocular bright colours iris eye alien watcher shine Blur Intentional Blur Macro Mondays

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Shower tile detail.

Fired clay is usually porous to water, and one of the main reasons for glazing it in a second firing is to make it impermeable. You get to add lustre and hardness too which makes glazing a winner!

So how to convey the impermeability of glaze?

This is a detail of the Italian tiles in my shower, sprayed with water from a garden sprayer (sorry about the cheat – I didn’t want to stand in a wet shower or deal with humidity on the lens, lol). I had to wait until afternoon to get the right light through the window.

In a touch of irony, I often think of ideas while in the shower but not this one!

So that’s my take on this week’s Macro Monday theme. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for looking and reading :)

[Handheld in daylight. Because of that I pushed the ISO (though the D90 struggles with noise when you do that) and propped the camera against the wall.
Cropped, rotated, and quite well tweaked in LR for exposure, colour and clarity/vibrance. Slight dark vignette. Moderately mangled in Topaz Detail to add a bit more drama; metadata and keywords in iMatch; published from LR.]

Tags:   Macro Mondays intolerant water impervious tile different shower droplet drop impermiable assertive hydrophobia wet Glaze

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Sherry Schooner.
I took a leisurely few days to think of a really clever, original, achievable idea for this week’s Macro Mondays theme. To help, I scoured the house up and down for suitable coloured objects…
Blank. That was the total result…

Been there before.

So, I decided to give up being clever and have some fun for myself instead. Making this image combined two things I’d been wanting to play with: glass reflections and refractions, and using the PC screen as a controllable coloured light source.
This is the outcome. The glass is Royal Brierley hand-cut lead crystal sherry schooner a couple of decades or more old. They still make them to this pattern though each one varies slightly as they are hand made and cut. The total height of the image is about 2¾ inches.
It’s placed about six inches directly in front of the screen which has a straight split between the orange on the left and blue on the right. The lighting and focus effects are quite complex when you look at them, partly because of the light multi-pathing in the glass I guess.

Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for pausing to look and even read!

[As an aside in colour theory terms the colours I have chosen aren’t quite complements (opposites) in RGB terms, more like split complements.
Tripod mount, delayed shutter. Colour corrected monitor displaying #E5471E and #1C00EB. Very light processing in LR – almost any other mangling or sharpening I tried made it worse. The magenta artefacts in the image are as seen.]

Tags:   complements glass blue tension Orange and Blue sherry mirror pop art refraction split complements reflection schooner Macro Mondays orange colour

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