Weekly Theme - "MACRO BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT"

[ChicagoJohn]

John - great job on these - and something I haven't tried myself ..... so much to learn so few brain cells left

Thanks to everyone who commented on the oil/water trial. Just for the record, I love and will always recall watergirl's inspiration and SueSue's wall hanger. I rarely encounter images that motivational.

But, when I figured out how to get the focus and was starting to shoot one after another in focus, it occurred to me that I loved every one, and that what I really was loving was the newness and surprise in the next one.
And I know that watergirl and SueSue know what I'm talking about, as will anyone who tries this in ernest.

If you want to try this, yorkshireman, I'd definitely recommend it. Here is what I did, and it probably could be a lot simpler. I shot light from below through a diffuser and then some transparent glass with colors. The key thing, I found, was to use a strobe of some kind below so you can use a constant light source like a bright LED flashlight to allow you to adjust focus. So if you have a speedlight and a little LED bright flashlight, that combo will work.

Though in the morning I tried shooting handheld, that evening I finally took suesue's advice and used a tripod with the lens face positioned as close as possible to parallel to the subject. That consisted of about an inch of water in a clear glass little bowl, sitting on top of the colored glass. I used a knife dipped in peanut oil at just the tip and then allowed to drip off mostly, vegetable oil being what SueSue suggested, and then "flung" it hard several times at the water to create tiny tiny drops. Some of them come together and coalesce as you go on with it.

I found that with the strobe, I did have to stop up to at least an f/7 to get the required lack of depth of field. The water and the oil droplets are going to be moving, so a strobe is necessary, in my experience. That way, you're capturing a 1/1000 second event. So to get down to f/7, I had to use two ND filters, each 0.9 for a total of 99% attenuation or something like 6.5 stops. Without the "model light", the LED light, you can't see anything to manually focus with the ND filters. But with the constant light, it's pretty easy to do. I used a Tamron 90 mm 1:1 macro lens backed up with a Vivitar 2X teleconverter, yielding, in effect 2:1 magnification ratio. The images posted aren't cropped. I only have a 6 MP sensor, but anyone with a higher pixel density could achieve the same result by cropping a lower magnifcation factor, of course.

So then I would just bend over the camera and using the tripod positioning as a base, slightly move the camera back and forth, up and down a little, and change lens focal length a little, to get good visual focus and snap the shot, 70+ shots. I guarantee you, yorkshireman, that if you do this yourself and work out the remaining details, you will have one of the most enthralling hours or two you've had lately with photography. Maybe like scuba divers have, I wouldn't know, but beautiful things keep forming before your eye, and you can't stop shooting because you don't want to miss the next one.

I'll never do this again, (my back isn't up to it), but I'm sure glad I did once and I'd recommend it to everyone at least once. Thanks again watergirl and suesue!!

[SONYNUT]

future sandwhich

[SONYNUT]

and yet another riveting macro picture

[yorkshireman]

What can I say, this theme has produced the best response for many a long time and some great images, apologies if I didn't comment on your specific image but I have had other things on my mind the last couple of weeks.

..... and that gives me an idea for the next theme, this theme is now closed, once again thank you for the great response.