A Flash Photo Session

Decided to have some practice using flash lighting to take some close shots of a few flowers. Also decided to shoot in RAW, something I haven't bothered with much in the past. Partly when I was running Windozy XP they wouldn't show as thumbnails so I had no idea what each one was until it was loaded into one of the few image viewers capable of recognising a RAW file. The MacBook doesn't have those problems.

These have all been enhanced a little in the free beta version of Serif's Affinity Photo which is still being developed and continuously updated. What a difference when a RAW file is loaded. It loads into a different section of the program (they call the different sections personas). Here there are many tweaks for clarity, tonal values, etc.. I am still more than a little impressed at the speed of the program. All tweaks are seen instantly.

They were all saved as jpg with just a small 5% compression as RAW isn't recognised by Flickr and large PNG or TIF files take for ever with my slow upload speed. None of the files have been cropped. All are solo shots, no stacking this time.

 The set up:




The first subject looked good initially until it was loaded in the laptop. The flower of the Globular Buddleia was a devil to get anything like in focus. It has few sharp edges to focus on:




Next came a Chives flower head which produced an additional surprise:


A small ant continuously crawling round the flower:






The head of a dwarf Bulrush which also had a small spider or mite which I only noticed when the photo was enlarged.
 



A small cactus. For this one I had to point the flash guns at the ceiling as the plant was so shiny. The yellow background was a marigold glove held behind the plant:







Lithops (Living Stone):




Finally - Bryophyllum - has many common names including Devil's Backbone:





It is unusual in that new plants grow round the edge of every leaf complete with tiny roots. A mature plant can have a dozen or more leaves each with over a dozen plantlets which drop off when ready and start new plants:


That's the lot. You can let out that sigh of relief now.

Not a Quick Flash Photography Session

Having read about and seen the results from the flash set up that Adrian uses for macro photography on ADRIAN'S IMAGES I decided it was time to have a go as I usually use just an LED ring flash and a LED lamp.

I bought a bracket combination which would hold two flash guns complete with a Y splitter so both could be connected to, and fired at the same time by, the Canon 50D. That was the theory but was almost impossible to get working in practice. Maybe the matched pair of cheap flash guns I also bought kept interfering with each other. Whatever the reason either both would keep flashing like some demented lightning storm or just plain refuse to work. It took a couple of hours faffing about trying all sorts of changes to various settings and a card full of blank or over exposed shots to sort things out.

In the end I dug out my old Canon Speedlight, added an extra short bracket so the Canon was connected to the Speedlight and the ring flash. The remaining flash gun was set up as a slave so it would fire as soon as it saw the flash from the Speedlight. The guns were fitted with their diffusers and all set for minimum light output. Now things were cooking with gas and worked properly every time.



The lens combination is the Canon 70-200mm zoom lens fitted with a Raynox Super Macro Conversion Lens. My patient subject was a juicy 35mm Asda strawberry, now scoffed as part of my tea and very tasty it was too.

 

The lens was manually set to f10 and lighting adjusted to get a reasonably lit shot. With my old set up the aperture would have been around f4. At least f10 gave a better depth of focus.

Macro on Monday - Guess What

Well, I thought last week's mystery photo was going to be too easy but as it turned out only one person managed a close identification of the broken egg shell so the virtual Midmarsh Gold Star and my congratulations go to Wilma.

     

Not a boiled egg but part of an egg shell I found near my front gate.

Many thanks to all who had a go.


I think this week's macro will be difficult but maybe I will be completely wrong again.
Guess What:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday.
No prizes. Just a warm feeling and maybe a virtual Midmarsh Gold or Silver Star.

And now for Something Completely Different .....

You will probably love it or hate it!  Personally I love it.

A video of a grey squirrel visit transformed into a cartoon style movie using the Mac app Celling Video:



My first attempt. The creaking sounds aren't from my brain trying to puzzle things out but the auto focus in the camera lens.

Once some of the 'hidden' choices were found there is an endless variety of cartoon type effects which can be applied to a video. Some things work well,  those with bold subjects without lots of fussy detail. It was raining when the video was taken so that explains the vertical lines / blobs.

Contrails

The forecast rain arrived about midnight. So far today we have had 12.6mm, about half an inch and possibly a lot more to come as it is slow moving though the Met Office radar prediction does show most of it going slightly north and south of me.

On one of our walks down Old Mill Lane I was struck by the sight of multiple contrails which all seemed to be converging in the distance.  Some are probably heading to / from Humberside Airport (or whatever its name is these days) others to other airports further inland. It shows how busy the skies are above Lincolnshire. Fortunately only a distant sighting or a contrail are the only things noticeable as the commercial flights are too high to hear any sound from the aircraft.



When I see the length of Penny's tongue I sometimes wonder whether she isn't part anteater:

 

Out turning round point down this particular lane:



Aircraft which fly lower and can be heard are military on exercise, daily helicopter flights to oil and gas rigs in the North Sea and occasionally the Coastguard rescue helicopter:

Song Thrush

Sorry, no new flicks for this Friday.

One of our walks across one end of the cricket field gave an opportunity to see a Song Thrush foraging. It was a reasonable distance away from us so I had to put the Nikon on maximum zoom, point and hope as it was bright Sunlight and I could hardly see the screen on the camera.







I frequently see a couple of them on the field but they usually fly away. This one, though keeping an eye on us, didn't seem particularly bothered by our presence.

A Quick Drink

A couple of days ago I sat in the Summer House for a while braving the cold breeze blowing straight in the door and keeping an eye on the garden pond waterfall. One of the few visitors was a Collared Dove which came for a quick drink:



It flew off again when it spotted me watching:






Every so often I have had a quick look at the nest box in the churchyard. No chance of any birds using it as it was surrounded by bees, some hovering just outside and some going in and out so I assume they have a nest in there.