Another Pair Of Eyes

EMW

…or Early Morning Waking. It’s actually a symptom of depression, but in my case it’s a symptom of psychiatry attachment. I like being up before everyone else – the house is quiet and the world is quiet and you feel like you have all the time in the world. I can flit silently about the house and prepare everything before I’ve even sat down at my desk to watch the sky turn to flame. On that note, whoever decided that building houses on the other side of the road was clearly a moron, because they do somewhat interrupt my view of the sunrise. Better city planning needed, says I.

Anyway, I’ve got a free hour to do some work in now, so I’m going to get on and do some in the early morning light.

Taken from my desk in the early minutes of sunrise.

Answers

Well, here we are – a group of things which show, from a distance, the objects in the macro quiz (if you haven’t had a look at it and want to without knowing the answers, scroll down really fast NOW and don’t look at the picture!). The astute of you will notice that one of the items is missing – this is the camera strap on my camera, which doesn’t get far enough away from it to photograph any way other than it was. Enjoy!

Macro Quiz

What’s what when you see it up close?

EDIT: Many of the answers are in the comments, so if you want to guess yourself don’t read them until you have!

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Submit your answers now!

the irony of making a quiz is not lost on me.

Tubes

So I said I’d write something about extension tubes, and now I will. An extension tube is, as the name suggests, a simple tube which fits on to a camera in between the sensor and the lens. The distance is usually controlled by mixing and matching parts of the tube and combining them. In my case, I have three sections – combined they make up 65mm of extension.

What this extra distance achieves is twofold. On the good side, it means that for any given lens, the minimum focus distance is vastly reduced. Extension tubes don’t magnify anything – they’re just full of air. Leave that to the teleconverters. What they let you do is get much closer to your subject without turning it into a blurry mess of colour. However, there is a trade off to that in terms of depth of field (the range which is in focus at any given time) – the closer stuff gets, the narrower the DoF becomes.

You can attatch any lens you like – the longer it is, though, the less effect the tubes have. However, it is possible to attatch and extend as much as you can just to make your camera look ridiculous:

However, it’s a bit unwieldy, and not very good. Shorter is better. This only works up to a point as the shorter the lens is you use, the closer something has to be to focus on it. When putting the 28mm lens on the full set of tubes, I could only focus on things about 1cm in front of the lens or closer. Obviously once the maximum focus is inside the camera then you run into problems. The other issue is light – with the lens that close to whatever-it-is in the photo, there isn’t much light about to get to the sensor. As such, you need a longer shutter time, and so you need everything to be perfectly still.

The effect, though can be pretty impressive. Here is the top of an ordinary ballpoint pen:

28mm lens, shutter 1/5s, f8, ISO 400 with 65mm extension

You can see the reflection of the camera lens in the ink on the rollerball bit. Also see how unbelievably narrow the depth of field is. Also see how impossible it would be to photograph anything that was moving with that kind of level of detail! On the 50mm, things are a bit more normal, but not much…

Anyway, tubes tubes tubes. They have their disadvantages but the manual ones are DIRT CHEAP, so it doesn’t really matter. You can get fancy auto ones that let you control the lens from the camera, but you might as well buy another lens. Manual ones are cheap and simple, and although you need to set everything yourself (if you’ve got lenses without an aperture control ring you’ll be limited to minimum aperture, all the time) I’d say they are worth the investment, if only to look at things from a different perspective now and again!

Those of you with SLR cameras, go on ebay and buy some metal tubes for £6 and see what you can do. Anything is fair game if it will stay still long enough…

*goes to find more stuff to inspect at very close range*

Extension Tubes and Finale Notepad

Oh, Finale Notepad. You promised me so much, and yet I find myself frustrated by you so often. It would appear that so many simple things are beyond you. D.C al segno confuses you and is unfamiliar, and putting a semibrieve and quavers on the same stave in the same bar? Well, that would be outrageous. I had to add another stave to the music…but wait! Another stave? Surely that cannot be done on a piano, you must define my piece as one for organ. To add insult to injury, you insist on making me count ledger lines rather than writing a simple 8vB – this is surely equivalent to criminal neglect. Still, I suppose that in the absence of a more complex and functional friend, your thrifty ways will have to do and I shall simply have to work around your idiosyncrasies in my quest to work out Philip Glass’ Metamorphosis II* without paying through the nose for it. So far, irksomeness of your interface aside, things are progressing at a halfway-decent rate such that my irritation does come packaged with a dash of gratitude. Hear my muttered thanks, Finale, but do better next time.

Other news. I am developing a pathological hatred for the annoying sing-song of the ice cream van that, without fail, pulls up outside our house EVERY BLOODY DAY spewing insipid sound in all directions. I was playing with my extension tubes and 50mm prime this morning, and then with layers on pixelmator to see what effects different blending would have. I never noticed that £2 coins were initialled before this morning. When you spin a coin fast enough, the rotating image of one face appears in it. Interesting in that you can see one side or the other, but if you see both at once they appear to rotate in opposite directions. I place money on there being a simple explanation, but I like the oddity so I refuse to think about it too much. I’ve taken to just eating cress randomly in the absence of more appropriate things to do with it. It is like I’d imagine eating peppery grass to be.

50mm lens, 1/125s at f8 with 30mm extension tube

How big does cress get if you just leave it to grow?

More extension tube fun, same setup as above. Three layers in pixelmator, two identical (one normal blend, one screen blend) and one desaturated with colour dodge blending. I like it. I’d never noticed the initals or the pattern in the middle before…

*which interpretation do you prefer?

Playtime

During my fits of non-workyness I’ve been doing various things that interest me, learning things I’ve fancied learning awhile is one. The piano goes on in the background, the seeds are growing still (and will need repotting soon…) and today it was the turn of Pixelmator – the not-really-photoshop program I use to edit photos. It’s damn good, actually, and I’m very pleased with it. However, I’ve been thinking for a while that I should learn to do more than the odd bit of retouching here and there so I figured I’d start simple and move up from there. I searched about for some tutorials and set to work playing with generators and filters etc. After about half an hour or so I’ve made rain and lightning and all sorts, but oddly the thing I like most is just the many-layered blending patterns approach with various quartz-generated odds and ends in and a coloured overlay on top. It started out with just circles of different sizes but once I got to true experimenting with all the different possibilities (not used even half of them yet though, I must confess) I got something I was cheery enough with to post here. I left it big enough to use as a background or similar if you should so wish.

Parsnip

I’ve had really strange cravings recently. Not just any old cravings either, but the dread ‘green fingers’ drive. I want to garden. I want to grow things, and weed, and tend to plants and stuff.

Yes, it’s true. I have offically become old.

It all started with an unlikely parsnip (aside: do you know that practially no-one in Holland even knows what a parsnip is?) which I found in the fridge after the easter break. This particular parsnip, left for a fortnight in the dark cold fridge, had not gone mouldy but instead had sprouted. It looked a little pale, and the main taproot had, of course, been cut off by the supermarket, but I thought hey: let’s give it a chance. I went outside that very morning and planted it (not very deep, I might add – the lack of any digging tools finer than a small rock combined with the fact I needed to keep my nails clean as was seeing patients that day meant digging a parsnip-sized hole was harder than you might expect).

As you can see, it’s not dead yet three weeks further down the line, which is quite a lot more than I expected. In fact, it’s still going strong – I’m just hoping that it’s managed to grow some roots such that when the parsnip part of it ‘runs out’ it can continue to thrive in the rather rubbish soil. I hold better hopes for my little seedy pepper and chilli plants though, despite them not having germinated yet. Still, I’m glad its doing well for now.

Other exciting news, for me at least – yesterday I blew £80 of savings money and bought a new lens with, wonder of wonders, autofocus. It’s a Tamron 70-300mm zoom, and it’s all big and fat and awesome looking (and also, with the application of dark glasses and a hood, very stalkerish). It focuses by itself. You don’t know how exciting that is. Anyway, I’ve yet to take it out for a proper spin which I will do at some point, but just playing in the garden with it’s zoomy not-quite-a-real-macro mode got me a rather nice close up of this:

The photo is a crop, admittedly, but it’s a big one (when I’ve not cut half the size out for this blog) and pretty sharp. I am pleased =) Hopefully I have successfully managed to make all these photos link to (slightly) bigger versions of them. Size remains limited though: saves on bandwidth and means I keep my originals to myself =D