Gustaf Thorslund's /dev/random

Those who have been looking for a model who:

• Can show up in the middle of nowhere
• Work late evenings
• Do not mind getting a flash placed about 3 cm from the eyes
• Who can be placed on a tray
• Works for free

Will know they can be hard to find. One in pretty good shape ¹ was found in our house some days ago. So I decided to give it a shot or more.

First I put it on a white plate but when I saw the reflections in the plate I got the idea to put it on a stainless tray instead. The light sources was: Ambient light (through windows and a lamp in the room), a torch, and external P-TTL flash in wireless mode. I used a 100 mm macro lens and the camera in manual mode on 30s, f/32, iso 100. This gave an under exposure of about two steps that the flash had to compensate for. I also used some paper ² to make the light softer.

A first sample where I had the flash from the right and some papers to reflect the light in (but no paper between the flash and fly).

The flash light became a bit too hard on the fly so I put the flash outside the paper instead.

Now I got a softer light.

The torch I used to add some extra light from the upper left side during the 30 seconds exposure. It was placed outside the paper all the time.

Maybe I treated my model too bade anyway since it tried to find some help.

(Swedish->English: Hjälp->Help, Avbryt->Abort, Upprepa->Repeat)

Finally the model found the right way out.

So now I will have to look around for a new model

For post processing I have RawTherapee and Gimp. I set the white balance and adjusted the exposure a bit. Then I removed some dust, marks, and disturbing reflections to make the background cleaner.

A Friday night (at about 16:40) back in December I took this picture:

Last Friday afternoon (at about 16:55) I was around at the same place with my camera. With the old picture in the back of my head I took this picture:

Looking at them they are not taken at exactly same place. They are not even taken at same focal length, but I’ve cropped them afterwards. I’ve also straighten up the perspective and adjusted white balance using RawTherapee.

I should really try to take the second picture later in the evening. Then I could also try to locate the same place I took the winter picture from.

My daughter made me some balls of ice to take photos of. For this she put a water balloon outdoors to freeze over night (was some weeks ago). Some of them also got some pearls in them. Her is one of the pictures:

I have cropped it down a bit and it is also scaled down in size (click on it to get a bit bigger picture).

And here is one that my youngest son did.

I think he used an ordinary and straight balloon instead of a round water balloon.

The set up was to put a lamp inside a glass put upside down. Kept the room as dark as possible to make this light the main light source. On top of this I put the ice.

The pictures was taken with a 100mm macro lens at f/32. With ISO 200 I got an exposure time of 15 seconds. Sometimes I had issues with the ice gliding around so using a flash as light source would probably have helped to freeze the motion.

When starting to look at macro photography I saw a not too expensive way to get started would be to revert my 18-55mm lens in front of my 50-200mm lens.

Trying it out

I soon realized I needed to have the tele lens at about 200mm to not get black borders around the picture. Since the focal length of the normal mounted lens should be divided by the focal length of the reversed lens to get the magnification I got a magnification for 4:1 and closer with the tele at 200mm (was hoping to get 1:1 and closer).

Since my lenses doesn’t have any aperture rings I made the reverted lens wide open manually and only stopped down the normal mounted lens.

I focused both lenses on infinity and focused on the subject by moving the camera forward and backward.

To get some light I put a couple of lamps around to be able to focus (by moving the camera back and forward). Then I held up a paper to reflect some of the light from my built in flash down in the spoon.

Result

I did some attempts with the reversed lens zoomed out a bit to get higher magnification, but then I set it to 50mm so I got a 4:1 shoot. After this I cropped it down to about half size and got this image:

Since the result was not too obvious I posted the image as Quiz #1: What’s on the photo?.