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.
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