tiny beauty

Its easy for us to appreciate what is essentially shoved in our faces for us to see in daily life, however the minuscule and insignificant (to the eye) often conceals a beauty.

My Mum loved "Spanish Moss" ... I grew up knowing it only as "Father Christmases Whiskers", she had it hanging off trees in the back yard (with the orchids). This is it in the picture below.

It is an epiphyte which seems to do well enough out in the backyard without any care or attention from me.

I thought it might be nice to hang some off a hook in the bathroom, where it may do "better" given the daily "air moisture" from having a shower. So I put a bit of it on the hook by the window and went about my business (admiring it occasionally). I noticed a few days ago that it had something I've never seen before growing on it ...

and to my eyes it looked like a flower of some sort. Its quite tiny and putting on my glasses (God I hate getting old, well God, while we're talking I hate a number of the other things you've done too) saw that it was indeed flower like.

So I whacked on my 50mm lens onto my extension tubes and took some shots.

Its quite beautiful when you get in closer isn't it

mirror mirror, who has the hardest slap of all

as obvious as this is going to sound, not having a mirror is a huge advantage for micro 4/3, because I don't need to lock the mirror up in macro photography.

I know this sounds obvious, but it just slapped me in the face yesterday making a comparison between my 50mm lens with extension tubes on 35mm and with my G1.

Forgetting about the other optical issues, look at this screen snapshot of two images, one taken with my 35mm camera, the other with my G1. Both with the exact lens and stack of extension tubes, both focused on the same point.



Its often been said by camera makers "ohh, you don't need mirror lock up, we've sorted vibration out" ... but macro and telephoto users know that mirror induced vibration is right in the place where it hits you the most ... around 1/30_th of a sec and down to 1 second.

Both these were taken on the same tripod with only swapping out the camera from the "system"

Clearly the G1 only crops out the middle of the full frame image, but even with effective focal length being similar to double, its not really like putting a 100mm on a full frame because your working distance is not the same.

Still ... not bad



so, if you ever wondered about the benefits of mirror lock up ... mirror-less may help you to get it.

great, now I never need to worry about locking up my mirror when I do my (irregular) macro work :-)

Close up with 4x5

As surprising as it may seem I have not yet done any close up work with my large format camera. Perhaps all the 'bellows factor' calculation has put me off at a subconscious level.

Well, I had some fresh flowers handy last weekend, and thought "why not".

So with the digital camera as a light meter and Bob Wheelers VadeMecum as my guide for correcting for bellows factor I took this image.

I used my 90mm lens and the image is nearly 1:1 (meaning that 1cm of flower will appear as 1cm of negative). I am really quite surprised how well the 90mm (a wide angle) performs in close up. Not only is the angle of view better than what I get using a smaller format (such as the digital) but the depth of field is good too. All in all its come up rather well I think.

As well as the wonderful tonality seen here, there was significant detail available from the image too.

I thought I'd include a segment of a scan from the film done at only 600 dpi (click it to see that sized on your screen properly) to give you an idea what's visible in the image. I've inspected the negative at x10 and found that its quite sharp, probably supporting scans at 3000 dpi. Sadly my scanner runs out of grunt at about 1800dpi so I'd need to pay for that ;-)



This would allow you to make a print about 1.2 m high if one wanted to print something as big as that! You can click on either of these images to see them a little bigger :-)