Playing with the new flash

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:39:40 -0700

So as I mentioned earlier, I got a new flash for macrophotography. It's pretty cool! Of course, the first thing I did was stick it on the camera and point it at something on my desk, in this case a stuffed animal. Here's the first shot:

IMG_1207-01

As you can see, the eye reflects the twin tubes of the ring flash, and they're firing equally. One of the typical complaints about ring flashes is that the light they give is extremely flat. The Sigma allows you to adjust the power, so that one side fires more strongly than the other in order to create shadows. Here's an example:

IMG_1208-01

Now the tube on the left is firing at 8x the power of the one on the right, and you can see that in the reflection. You can also see a little bit more of a natural-looking shadow effect in the fur right above the eye.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Chain

nobody@vox.com(Patti) — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:19:50 -0700

BigChainMacro

So you're sitting in the coffee house at a friend's motorcycle shop, and you happen to have all of your camera gear with you, including a macro lens and the whizzy bend-every-which-way tripod you dropped a kilobuck on recently.

What do you do? You go into the back room of the shop, where they keep all the works in progress and parts bikes, and start taking pictures.

This closeup of a motorcycle chain was my favorite of the bunch. If you view the full-size image (which is available here ), you can even see the lint on the O rings and the sprocket.

I'm surprisingly happy with the lighting, given that it was nearly dark in the room and I used the camera's built-in flash. That typically doesn't work so well when you're about six inches from the subject, in my experience.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Patti's random noise

Playing with the new flash

Chain