Archive for the ‘Macro’ Category
14 February 2010 Purrrty (to me) Pictures
Last night the kids went to bed relatively early after a day of play and Maki had the night shift, so I stayed up and fooled around taking pictures, first from my balcony and then from my preferred studio (the kitchen table).
7 February 2010 Yet More Pottery Macros
I’m going to have to start thinking of better post titles. Today we went to the Kamada’s for dinner, and I got another little sake cup. I decided to use it as an opportunity to take more methodical shots, this time lit only by the light of a single candle. This little cup was ostensibly given to me for my past birthday, but every time I go over to his house and ostentatiously praise a piece of non-for-sale-pottery, there’s a decent chance I’ll end up taking it home, so I have to be careful to keep my mouth shut for fear of wearing out my welcome.
This first shot is a pretty good representation of how the cup actually looks (or about one centimeter of it lit by a candle, anyway). However, since the candlelight was so red, I had to yank the whitebalance in Lightroom all the way over to the blue to begin to approach reality.
The image below is much closer to how it came out of the camera. Kind of makes me think of the fiery pillars of hell, reminding me to help little old ladies across the street. I like this alternate take, it being so much more expressive than the first, cool shot. One interesting thing about this shot is that there is much more information left in the image. I didn’t have to yank the image so far over to the blue end of the spectrum that lots of the photons in the red channel got lost, so we see much more of the cup than otherwise.
And, I couldn’t resist a shot or two of the candle as well.
3 February 2010 “Flaw”
Getting back into some macro work. This is another cup made by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) that I use for sake or scotch. That little dimple in the middle, about a millimeter or two across, is the reason I have this beautiful piece of pottery. It’s a flaw that prevented it from being sold. As my kids would say, “Thank you, mister flaw.” (No, not referring to me.)
This one really deserve to be seen full size
9 October 2009 First Gallery Experience
So today was the second day of my photography group’s exhibition, and my day to go and “mind the store.” It was the first time I saw my pieces printed and framed, and I was very pleased. Here I am hamming it up in front of my piece, Mountain Storm, which is an abstract macro of a piece of pottery about 5 mm (1/4″) across.
For a better view, click here.
Now that I have a mountain, I want to continue the series and see if I can make interesting depictions of rivers, oceans, or or the sky using similar techniques. The hard part is to make it interesting and somehow emotionally impactful. Yes I know that isn’t a word.
Here is my piece next to another tryptic of some Kabuki actors. I described the process of how these three photos were selected here. I like how they placed the most abstract piece next to the most dramatically human and concrete.
I like each of these photos, and I like them together.
This is the sensei’s piece. The location is Izumo Jinja, a huge shrine. The tree is white because people have tied thousands of fortunes to it. When you’re at a shrine or a temple in Japan, you often buy a fortune for a dollar or two. People usually bring the good fortunes home, but tie the bad ones onto a nearby tree, from which they are collected once a year and burned en masse.
5 October 2009 “Mountain Storm”
So, after I went to my photography teacher’s place with a single pottery macro and he told me to reshoot it as a nature-inspired tryptic, this is what I came up with. I won’t bother posting a thumbnail here, since the image is so long. Click on that link and then expand the browser window to see the whole thing.
The title of the piece is 山嵐, or “Mountain Storm,” although it sounds more dramatic in Japanese. Each piece in the tryptic will be printed on A3 size paper, which is 16.5 inches (420 mm) across. The length of the pottery shard (graciously given by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二)) pictured in all three frames is smaller than the width of my thumbnail.
I can’t wait to see them hanging on the wall along with everybody else’s pieces!
One challenge I had while shooting is that a very slight change in angle of the light (from an LED flashlight) completely changed the characteristics of the image, since the glaze has all different kinds of metallic crystals, reflections from which are very sensitive to changes in direction of light source.
29 August 2009 More Shakuhachi Macros
I’ve got not one but two concerts tomorrow, so for good luck I think I’ll post some more shakuhachi macros to follow up on my previous post.
As I mentioned before, the friend of my teacher’s who did this maki-e is the official artisan for the imperial household, the official symbol of which is the chrysanthemum. Apparently he can use the chrysanthemum motif for other things as well, as long as it doesn’t have the same number of petals as the imperial one, which is sometimes 14 and sometimes 16.
I knew this shakuhachi from before it got the gold leaf; I had tried to play it and completely failed. (This is a very “high octane” flute–it will perform for you, but you gotta have the breath or it won’t even give you as much sound as a beginner instrument). When I first saw it with the maki-e, I thought it didn’t need it, but now that I’m used to it I just love it.
Bamboo starts out pale yellow and gets darker with age. This dark color is, in official shakuhachi parlance, called “really frickin’ old.”
19 August 2009 New Gold and Old Bamboo
One of the shakuhachis I am most fortunate to own is called Jo-un (恕雲), made by Tomomasa Gakudo (岳童友正) early in the 20th century. The bamboo itself, however, is clearly much older. The thing plays like a monster. No other shakuhachi I have ever played has the same tone. One friend and a fan of my teacher Taniguchi-sensei was the official maki-e (gold leaf art) artisan of the imperial family, and he decorated a few flutes for my teacher. Jo-un is one.
I took these macros with paired 27.5 mm extension tubes and a 1.4 teleconverter attached to my ZF 100/2. To give you an idea of the size, the width of each of these is less than my thumbnail. To have brushed on many successive layers of gold leaf in such a scale and with such precision boggles the mind.
I should really write an explanation of what the characters written in gold leaf mean, their history, etc., but I’m tired, I’ve had my nightly nip of scotch already, and tomorrow’s a long day.
16 August 2009 More Pottery Macros
Here are a few more that didn’t make it into yesterday’s post because they showed no “naked” earth.
15 August 2009 Fragmentary Macros
I’ve talked about my potter friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) twice before. This time I asked him for some fragments of broken pieces to play around with and he was nice enough to oblige.
These shots were taken with my ZF 100/2 macro lens, my very crappy tripod (I used a 5 second timer, on the theory that all the wobbles from pressing the button would have extinguished by 5 seconds after pushing the shutter), my SB-900 flash, and a PK-13 extension tube. This 27.5 mm ring is just an empty tube that fits between the lens and the camera. Working on the same principle that when you move a magnifying glass farther away what’s in it gets bigger, this little ring can magnify images by a lot. And, since it’s just empty space in there, there is no loss of image quality. What you do lose is light, and the ability to focus very far away, but both of these are negligible for table-top macro photography.
Since I used a macro lens with an extension ring, what you are seeing are very, very close-up images of these fragments. Unfortunately my Nikon D90 does not glean any photographic information from the lens, but these were all taken between f11 and f16. Even at these small apertures, the depth of field is still incredibly small at this short distance.
Finally, in this series the one that really benefits from clicking to enlarge is the second one, since its horizontal orientation means that it gets shrunk by a lot to fit into the space. And, this is the one that best exposes the boundary between stone and glass (which is really what the glaze is).
25 March 2009 Click to enlarge or your mother and I will be very disappointed in you
Always did love magnolia leaves
27 February 2009 Ghost Moss
I love how the ultra-thin depth of field created by aperture of f2 at very close distances results in ghost-like apparitions.
Tiny, tiny
Little bit more depth of field here
25 February 2009 Evanescent Jewel
Maintaining our all vegetable matter, all the time theme here at Zach awry in Japan. Taken at the same time as the previous two videos.
If you don’t click to expand, then why bother coming here? Why bother with anything?