Macro

Since breaking out the old macro filters yesterday, I decided I'd play around with them a little more.

And since I happened to be eating pistachios, why not take some macros of that?

As with yesterday, I wanted to have very deep depth of field, so I had to use a very small aperture. f22 in case you're wondering. Since aperture is one of the two exposer settings that effects how bright or dim a strobe looks, wouldn't f22 essentially render a strobe useless? So little light gets in with f22 that even the sun can look dim sometimes. How would a strobe compete with that?

The answer is distance. There's a very complicated law out there that would take forever to explain in detail (not that I even could), but in essence it states that the closer a light source is, the brighter it is. Makes sense right? Since a little flashlight at a tree a mile away and it's not going to illuminate much, but get right up to the same tree and it's like day light.

Even though I was so stopped down at f22, if I had the strobe positioned only a few inches from subject, then it would be much brighter. So much brighter in fact, that I only had to use 1/16 power...in a soft box that robs about 2 stops of light! Physics is pretty cool, right?!

In case you think this sound familiar, its the same principle I used for my shot yesterday.

Here's the photo from today...

and here's a different angle...

and to demonstrate how stopped down f22 is, this is shot into a lamp turned all the way up. Same settings as what I used for the other shots. You can see how little light actually gets to the sensor.

The set up for the first two shots was almost identical to yesterdays shot. A 560 in a soft box right over the nut at 1/16 as I mentioned before. Camera setting as the same too: 1/125, f22, ISO160. The one difference was that other 560 was aimed at the nut from about 7 inches behind and to the right to create a rim light and give more depth. This 560 was lying on the same surface as the nut to get the light from a low an angle as possible for maximum depth and texture enhancement.

In Lr I created a strong vignette on each photo to darken the wood and bring attention to the nut. I also toned the highlights down a bit on the shells, and boosted the clarity  A LOT. Cheap trick but oh well. I like the look of it. I had to brighten the shadows and blacks a bit to compensate for the raise in clarity. I'd like to know what that slider actually does....always screws up exposer.

Well that's all for now. See you tomorrow.