Extreme Macro Monday
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A portion of a piece of a silk handkerchief back lit.
Extreme Macro Monday
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A piece of back-lit silk. Bold strokes of what could have been a lively piece of modern art.
Extreme Macro Monday
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Taking advantage of the wonderful designs of discontinued paper currency from around the world.
Extreme Macro Monday
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A piece of silk at 4x life. I am aiming for designs that please the eye. More to come.
Extreme Macro Monday
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This a backlit photograph of part of a silk handkerchief. With silk and thin fabrics I have found backlighting provides adequate light and fewer highlights.
Extreme Macro Monday
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I found some old foreign currency. The designs were begging for a close up.
A Pot of Keys
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Not at the end of a rainbow.
Extreme Macro Monday
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Tempted to call this When Worlds Collide but they are only assorted beans (5x life).
Extreme Macro Monday
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This is a backlit old tie of mine shot at 5x life.
Extreme Macro Monday
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Head of a screw at 10x life. At this magnification movement is your enemy.
Extreme Macro Monday
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In trying my hand at extreme Macro (4x-10x life) with a microscope lens and a Laowa 2.5-5x lens, some of the results have been quite unusual. This is a screw head at 10x, the faint lines around it mean there was some movement in the stacked exposures (fortuitous error).
Window Pane – 2
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This just shows that the window pane, a popular lighting effect can be scaled. You could even use it in portraiture making it look like you were using a window light.
Window Pane
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The window pane pattern comes from a grid on my soft box off to the side. You can use any off camera flash in a cheap soft box but make sure you get a grid to create this effect and to better direct the light. Godox and Neweer have good boxes.
Top Down Lighting
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There are unlimited numbers of lighting schemes, and groups thereof. Taking top down lighting as an example, I wanted to try it with a very narrow beam of light – shooting down a cardboard paper towel tube was one thing I tried, then a few snoots (snoots are plastic, fabric or metal very like the paper towel tube I fabricated). I found most worked equally well regardless of length. It was where the light was focused that mattered most, and for me the best position was slightly in front of the object but shedding some light on the front of the subject. This called is feathering.
Forked
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This photograph was born of an idea to try something influenced by Busby Berkeley’s amazing cinema choreography (worth a look up on You Tube). Inspiration is a wonderful thing.
The Common Kitchen Sponge (Two Photographs)
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I was pretty sure that the sponge would make for an interesting subject. I did not realize it would be so fluid. Only about one in three tries at this level of magnification work out. In some cases I have taken a hundred shots on an educated guess of the outcome with mixed results.
Photography is an Art Form (Two Photographs)
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I am a firm believer that photography is an art form and that you can be very creative in this medium. It’s one of the reasons I decided to try extreme macro, the abstracts and designs are endless. In this case an old tape measure.
Lights, Camera, Action…
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At one point I worked in the Movies but that was a long time ago. My current camera, I am told, makes wonderful movies. I sincerely doubt that I could make a quality movie with any DSLR or mirrorless without purchases of necessary accessories, a considerable learning curve and new software. I am quite content with stills. The shot here was not easy and took three lights: a gridded soft box to the left pointed along the table, a second light highlighted the unraveling film, and a third acted as fill for the rest. After 60 shots I got the reel of film illuminated, after that it was smooth sailing.
Antiques
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The telescope and compass are brass reproductions from India, almost indistinguishable, except for their newness, from those used in early colonial days. The book is the Boys Own Annual 1899-1900.The lighting pattern here is a soft box to the side, shooting through a diffusion panel. Depending on the tilt of the box, the panel and strength of the flash in the box you can get more or less light fall off, I chose less. I placed the soft box higher, giving a darker table on the side of the soft box and more light farther out on the table.
Studio No.7
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In my experiments in still life photography, I have used some of what I have learned in doing macro and close up photography of insects in the field. But there is nothing like having every element of the photograph in your control. I start with a completely black photo, so that as I add light all the light is my decision, my creation.
Studio No.5
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When studying table top photography a good understanding of diffusion helps, as well as the various tools to help with diffusion (not just soft boxes, but things like bed sheets and shower curtains). The larger the source of light and closer it is to the subject, the softer it will be and the farther away the harder the light.
Studio No.4
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There are some very good lessons on studio lighting on Youtube – see Adorama, for example. When they talk about one light lighting, they usual mean one light and a reflector (which could just be a piece of white board to fill in shadows). Still life, table top photography calls for ingenuity and inventiveness (e.g DIY).
Studio No.3
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Most things have reflective surfaces that can cause hot spots, some of these may help your composition, most will not. Spending time understanding the angles that reduce hot spots is a necessary skill (move the camera or the light, find the angle with the best light and least hot spots).
Studio No.2
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Most of the points I make will sound obvious but believe me they matter. The first is about dust, no matter how clean your surface seems, there will always be dust. You won’t see it in camera or even looking closely at the set but it is there. While some can be fixed in processing it’s good to have a blower and cloth and go over the set several times.
Victor Rakmil Photography 