Titanium watch.
I first fell in love with titanium when I discovered that my neighbour had a made poker out of a rod of pure titanium (OK, at least one of us is weird!). The strange thing about it was that it was amazingly light, like heavy plastic or wood (it’s about 60% of the density of steel) but when you put it in the fire rather than melting or burning the handle just became hot. Definitely an odd challenge to our sensory preconceptions…
Titanium is stronger than steel and has a dark grey muted lustre. The best thing for me, and why I love it, is that it has a crystalline structure that sparkles in the right light, often in blues and purples (the poker was definitely purple though whether that was the heat or the purity I’m not sure). I did try to take a picture of the sparkles for this week’s MM but it ended up looking like a bad case of colour noise – perhaps another time.
Enough ramble, to the image. This is my much loved rather battered watch with its titanium case. There are probably three metals in the picture – gold makes a great contrast in colour, shine and reflectivity, and the watch face is in some brushed white metal, probably some steel alloy at a guess.
Thanks for looking (and reading if you got this far!). Hope you enjoy it HMM :)
[Top lit with daylight (yesterday's evening gloom more like – I was running late). Some extra light reflected on to the front just using white paper. Tripod; delayed release. I don't think I have ever taken a picture at f57 before lol.
Almost no mangling (hurrah!), just basic exposure stuff in LR and metadata in iMatch. No vignette… no really, I can do photos without one, scary though ;)
And you score 20 points if you’ve worked out that the date on the watch is wrong.:) Have fun!]
Tags: second white titanium letters macro grey Made of Metal purple time pressure late time gold hands watch Macro Mondays metal
© All Rights Reserved
I’ve always been rather attracted to this Papermate propelling pencil because of its transparent barrel and the details of the spiral mechanism for extruding the graphite. Oh, and the colour… So I could hardly resist when the spiral topic came around again for Macro Mondays.
A bit of a rush job though - one take and then a patch-up in the processing. Had I had more time I think I would have used a tripod and focus stacking (or a different lens). Ah well…
This is vaguely what I intended, or at least an inch and half of it anyway. The full pencil is more interesting :)
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Macro Mondays :)
Tags: no person equipment isolated disjunct diagonal plastic pencil Steel danger industry Sharp desktop technology composition tool business wood education writing power Macro Mondays HMM Spiral
© All Rights Reserved
Prism on iPad.
Well this didn’t quite turn out as I imagined…
The Macro Mondays theme today is One Color and, so the thinking went, with the dark nights I could at last control the lighting indoors. So plonk the prism on a single colour light source and we should be OK...
I used the iPad as I thought it would give a more consistent light than a PC screen. It did, but you can still see the pixels.
And I had hoped for more interesting internal effects too. No.
But at least I found some interesting geometric shapes. Next time I shall find a single-coloured feather ;)
The prism is about two inches long and one wide.
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Macro Mondays :)
Tags: no person triangle shape one pyramid illustration conceptual geometric abstract crystal container art pattern science construction symbol geometry Macro Macro Mondays One color Orange reflections nikon z 6 105mm f/2.8 HMM
© All Rights Reserved
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
© All Rights Reserved
Chess Piece.
For the Macro Mondays theme Queen this week I decided to use a wooden chess piece. But then I thought it was a fairly obvious idea... So how to make it different?
This is a top-down view of the black queen from the stained-wood chess set that I use for playing (rather than ornament). It's a relatively modern set of classical design and nothing special except that the pieces are relatively large and pleasantly tactile when you move them about.
I like the symmetry of the queen's crown, and wanted to use lighting from the side to emphasise it and the wood texture and, hopefully, to add interest. The board background is about 1.75" square.
The background is part of a book about the basics of chess showing the queen's possible moves. Because the piece can move diagonally and up and down the ranks and files it is usually very powerful, controlling a large area of the board.
Not that that does me much good though. I often lose my queen early on which I have discovered makes it difficult to win. I'm now learning to play Go lol.
Anyway I hope you enjoy the image. Thank you for taking time to look! HMM
[Hand held in daylight. The camera was almost a metre from the book and chess piece, using a telephoto setting to compress the relative distance but still trying to keep some of the depth of field blur. Processed initially in LR with a square crop and strengthening of the brown tones. Then to Affinity Photo with some time taken trying to get rid of noise (Little Ickle Camera's bane); sharpened in Topaz Detail (masked for the chess piece only because of the noise on the book page); finally a very slight soft dark vignette. Posted about 11pm on Monday... oops]
Tags: wood freedom above board scope chequerboard square rules top down chess game power Macro Mondays Queen moves
© All Rights Reserved