Another Eye

Sticking with the gray scale theme from yesterday, I went with a quick macro eye shot for today. This was mainly an experiment as to how well a soft box works up close on something as dynamic as a face.

Here's what it looked like...

Beautiful lighting as it turns out. The soft box was held about 5 inches from my face, so the light source is quite large relative to the subject. See how beautifully the transition areas are between the shadows and true value of the face. You can't even tell where the shadow ends and the true values begin! In addition to being pretty darn sharp, the specular highlight on the eye is really unique. I've never seen a highlight like that that actually shows the texture of the surface of the eye. The eye apparently isn't as smooth as I thought it was, you can see tiny bumps and inconsistencies on the surface.

I barely edited this one. I converted it to gray scale using a green filter. Essentially, this means that tones close to green get brighter, and the compliments of green get darker. Using this filter lightened the greens in my eye while toning most everything else down a bit.

I did a bit of iris enhancement since its such a macro shot. Sharpening and clarity were pretty much the extent of that work.

Other than the conversion and spot adjustment, I didn't do anything to this. It's pretty much straight out of the camera.

Speaking of the camera, I shot at 1/60, f13, and ISO200. Reason for the shutter speed was to grab of bit of ambient light to provide a base exposer and a little more smoothness as a fill. I used f13 to get nice depth of field on the eye while still keeping other parts of the face a little soft. Don't was the attention wandering too much. ISO200 because my batteries in the strobe are almost dead so I have to shoot at minimal power. i.e 1/64 power on the 560.

Lets talk about focus. At this macro distance, it's insanely hard to focus the camera on yourself. Auto focus basically stops working (don't know why, maybe light issues or an old lens. I'm using my old 18-55), so you have to manual focus and then play a guessing game at how far away the camera should be to your face. For this photo, I just started with the camera close to my face and slowly moved it back while hamming the shutter. A bit of spray and pray, but it gets the job done. The recycle time on the 560 was very short because technically it can fire 64 times before depleting the capacitor. At least that's my understanding. I'll have to look into that as the fraction might go back to analog photography when strobe power settings were based off apertures they were to be used with. I don't know if that system has changed over the years.

All for now, see you tomorrow. Hint, some portraits of someone other than me are hopefully coming soon....