Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Friday Slide Show: Multum In Parvo
27 February 2015
The Latin phrase multum in parvo could be the motto of every macrophotography image. However you translate it -- from the familiar "a lot in a little" to the formal "much in little" -- it describes every attempt to look for whole universes in the small details we don't normally stop to notice.
It certainly describes today's slide show.
The first three images in this series span about seven-eighths in width on the long dimension. That leaves a little room (very little) for composing the subject in the frame, as we did with the clay figure.
But the other images are looking at a world in which the frame is only three-eights of an inch wide. Some of the subjects are simply unrecognizable without their captions.
When we shot the three little books for A Valentine a couple of weeks ago, we enjoyed the change from our usual excursion to a studio project. Thinking about it a while, we thought we might just try something similar but this time using less than optimal optical stacks that we could process with Piccure+ to redeem them.
We talked about one of those stacks earlier this week in Why Is This Man Smiling? We used a Lensbaby Tilt Transformer with the standard Double Glass optic and two macro converters to get our seven-eighths macro shots.
We liked those enough to get a little bolder. We popped a Kenko 2x teleconverter in between the Tilt Transformer adapter and the Double Glass optic to get our three-eighths inch macros. Focus was limited to the maximum macro effect because the back of the Glass Doubler hit the front of the Kenko. But that was fine with us.
Mostly we hand held these shots. But the flowers required the control of a tripod to hold focus with such a shallow depth of field.
Exposures were determined by the Lensbaby's fixed f5.6 aperture disc, which we didn't bother to swap out for something smaller. ISO ranged from 200 to 1600. Shutter speeds from 1/100 to 1/640 second.
Camera Raws were converted to DNG on import and run through Piccure+. The resulting TIFFs were processed in Lightroom 5. We added Clarity, increased Contrast, cropped a little and adjusted Highlights and Shadows. The usual dance.
We think this series demonstrates a very nice application of Piccure+, improving the results delivered by marginal optical stacks into something, well, presentable. If we hadn't confessed, you wouldn't suspect us of any criminal activity.
But we also think those flowers are leading us somewhere else. Working through the viewfinder, we were intrigued by the colors waving across the frame before we found some detail to focus on. As abstractions they appealed to us.
Pure color. Brilliant color. In shapes that flowed across the frame.
We didn't experiment because we were interested in what Piccure+ could do with focused images. But we've heard that, except in unusual cases, there's always tomorrow.
Wonder how you say that in Latin?
