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Makes me want to sneeze already.
Tom, maybe we should start a club.
Thanks Tersha. Now I have to learn how to remove halo artifacts.
#shotonmoment
iPhone XR and Moment macro lens. Focus bracketed 40 images in CameraPixels and focus stacked in Affinity Photo. The flower is about one cm across and one cm deep. Yes, there are ghosts around the tiny petals and I can fix that in Affinity Photo. That’s the result of focusing all the way forward to capture detail in the stamens and blurring out the petals. I’ve found an example in the “Affinity Photo Workbook” on how to “easily” remove such ghosts in Affinity Photo but haven’t progressed that far yet.
The biggest challenge in capturing this image is, that tiny flower is on a fragile 15 cm long stem and waves with every flea sneeze. I used a light wire tie to anchor the stem to the iPhone base just below the image. And definitely use a sturdy tripod.
ISO: 25, Aperture: f/1.8, Shutter Speed: 1/431 second
iPhone XR and Moment wide angle lens. Easter Cactus Flower.
The real mystery to me is that this image is more than a 50X magnification of the real thing obtained by an iPhone XR, Moment macro lens, and Affinity Photo, and yet the individual pollen particles are still identifiable. The dimension of the 12 MP sensor in the iPhone XR is 5.6 by 4.2 mm. The diameter of each pollen particle is a fraction of the width of a hair. Clarity was obtained by focus bracketing and stacking 40 images and bicubic interpolating in Affinity Photo. I didn’t need a multi-thousand dollar lens and camera.
The above image came from the reproductive part of the floweret on the left in the image below. This group of geranium flowerets is about 6.25 cm wide, which gives an idea just how small a pollen particle is when zooming in on it. Look at that tiny piece of fiber stuck to the pollen on the top stamen. The end of that piece of fiber, just visible at the top of the above image, is more than a cm wide.
Could be part of a tree or not
Our trees haven’t even thought about running sap so we are a long way from flowers. So my contribution is from a lemon-scented geranium.
Robert, I can imagine that B.M. Bower would have had a lot to write about your mountain. I can see living in a small shack at the base of the mountain not far from a clear, cold spring, raising a garden watered from the spring, tilling a small plot of land with the old horses, and taking care of a few animals, sufficient to feed the family.
First attempt at adding some depth using haze. Used five layers of light-colored haze, and the size of each layer is larger than the ones below it. It may be better to slightly darken the haze color and thin it a bit more to make the deeper part slightly darker and sharper.
I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time and finally got around to trying it out. It
wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The mirrors have to be angled just right and they need a tiny bit more angle tweaking to get more reflected area. Then there’s the issue of too much light, so I under exposed by 0.8EV and then brightened some in Photos.My iPhone camera is mounted on a tripod and it wanted to hog the scene by mainly taking pictures of itself. So I lowered and pointed it up slightly. The room is only 6′ 4″ wide,and I wanted the reflections to appear across most of the image, so I attached my Moment telephoto lens.
My first problem was setting up the two movable mirrors to get the largest reflection areas. Try that; it ain’t easy. I have to stand with my eye located where the camera lens will be and jockey the two mirrors until the areas are maximized. Trouble is, my big head gets in the way. Then I have to get the camera lens into the correct location and it seems that the camera doesn’t agree with my eye. So I said, that’s good enough for now.
OK, now what do I focus on? I picked the wooden frame of the middle mirror and took a snap. Well, good, the wooden frame was in focus but nothing else. So on to Plan B. I launched CameraPixels and focus bracketed 20 images from 0.4 to 1.0. Then I focus stacked the images in Affinity Photo and exported to Photos. I clipped the image and brightened it a bit in Photos.
Well…if this don’t work there’s no future for me as model.
This image of a stove handle was taken with an iPhone XR attached to a Gosky Universal Cell Phone Adapter Mount attached to a Kenko Lens2scope 10mm 1:4 CE eyepiece attached to a Canon zoom lens EF 70:200mm 1:4 L attached to a Canon zoom lens mount attached to a tripod. (My wife thinks I’m crazy.) The lens was zoomed to 200mm and was about 1.2 meters from the door handle, which is the minimum distance it will focus. The lens depth of field was large enough to focus the entire image but the camera depth of field was not because of the iPhone’s large aperture and shallow depth of field. Thus, CameraPixels (paid version) was used to focus bracket 20 images and Affinity Photo was used to align and focus stack the images.
Why go to all this trouble? The same setup can be used to get some great images of craters on the moon. Problems? The Gosky mount doesn’t mate very well with the neck of the Kenko eyepiece, which causes the iPhone’s lens to misalign with the eyepiece image. The eyepiece cylinder has a relatively long rubber extension tube out to the eye, making it a bit too short to securely attach the Gosky mount. The fix I’m working on is to cut a short piece of PVC pipe into two halves, slightly longer than the eyepiece cylinder, and then duct tape them in place around the eyepiece. The PVC pipe does not interfere with the rubber extension tube and will give the Gosky mount a firmer base.
What else might it be good for? I recently purchased a 3rd generation Nyx Tracker that will track the stars and other heavenly bodies, and it is sturdy enough to support this contraption. Who knows?
Affinity Photo looks like it might be a useful way to add some haze or smoke into the more distant areas using a number of layers. https://www.brusheezy.com/ provides a bunch of free fog and smoke overlays and brushes that can be used with Affinity Photo. I plan to use the same thin fog or smoke on multiple layers and overlap them. The first layer will cover the smallest, most distant area. The second layer will be expanded to cover the next larger area and overlap the first layer. Each successive layer will be expanded to cover the next larger area and overlap the previous ones. The successive overlapping should produce progressively decreasing haze from far-to-near and should increase the sense of depth.
Dave, it’s a good thing we can’t see them like this when chasing around with a swatter. What I need to figure out is how to get them to sit still while sneaking up with my Moment lenses. What was your lighting here? I’m guessing in shade or cloudy because I don’t see any shadows.
Bucweeet, thank you for sharing this because it brought back some old memories. A 2nd Lt. in the Air Force in 1970, I was sent to pilot training at Reese AFB in Lubbock, TX. I didn’t get past the Cessna four seater stage because my eyes and brain weren’t adept at judging depth, and that doesn’t work well when crash landing jets onto hard surfaces. So while the decision was being made about what to do with me, a massive tornado struck Lubbock on May 11, 1970 and killed 26 people. It also hit part of the Lubbock municipal airport, specifically where all of the Air Force training Cessnas were tethered. The tornado twisted the entire fleet of Cessnas into one large mangled ball, and that ended the Cessna training program at Reese AFB for some time. And presumably that speeded up the decision to wash me out because I hadn’t passed the Cessna crash landing part yet.
The AF should have known better than try to make a silk purse out of a sows ear because disaster follows me. I was an Airman in 1969 and stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS when the devastating F5 Hurricane Camille struck. 259 people died that day, most of them needlessly. My fondest recollection of that ordeal was scooping mud out of officers’ houses.
After those ordeals they sent me to a remote location where I was never heard from again—until today.
This image might be helped a bit by using a mask to lighten up part of the upper half relative to the lower half to make the lower half look even more like a reflection. No matter what, my mind still demands that the area below the nearly horizontal ridge in the rocks be a perfectly smooth pool with a perfect reflection on its surface. Except, that on closer inspection this reflection somehow can’t be real. Any suggestions on how to modify the image to further fool the eye are welcome. I have Luminar 3 and Affinity Photo and will experiment with them. A title like “Reflection From a Pool in Zion National Park” wouldn’t be too far from the truth.
