| Photograph Information |
Photographer's Comments |
Challenge: Puzzle Macro VI (Standard Editing)
Camera: Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
Lens: Canon EF 35-80mm f/4.0-5.6 III
Location: A dustbin
Date: Feb 7, 2017
Aperture: 16.0
ISO: 1250
Shutter: 1/100
Galleries: Abstract, Macro
Date Uploaded: Feb 12, 2017
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A hand-held focus stack with a home-converted true macro lens. The interior of a fairly new Macbook Pro. I'll leave commentary on the ventilation design quality of Apple products aside in this instance, and instead talk about the shot.
I mentioned that this is a photo with a home-converted lens - a bit of an experiment. An interesting trick that you can carry out with the otherwise fairly useless 35-80mm 90s plastic zoom is that by removing the front element group altogether, you can convert it to a fairly capable fixed focus macro lens. Well - although you've removed the front group which is the only part that moves to focus this lens, it's not really fixed focus, as you can still use the former zoom as a sort of magnification control. At its best, at 80mm, it provides a fairly formidable 1.7x magnification with a subject distance of around 30mm - not to be scoffed at, considering you can grab one of these otherwise crappy zooms for about £30 on ebay, and suddenly end up with a reasonable competitor to the far more expensive Canon MP-E 65mm.
At such magnifications, of course you need a lot of light and a small aperture; however, this was a snapshot taken while cleaning a business laptop, and I didn't really have time to set up the lights and a tripod - hence the fairly high ISO, as the light was an LED torch placed close to the board to project strong shadows. As mentioned earlier, this was a hand-held shot - in fact a focus stack of two images from a consecutive burst, to maximise the depth of field. I'm not entirely happy with the level of sharpness here, but I'm not sure there was much more I could do. Although I could have gone smaller than f/16, I would have started to lose more sharpness due to diffraction - and this jerry-rigged DIY lens has a rather curved field of focus anyway, so there are diminishing returns to be had in the depth of field department, anyway.
Editing: Curves to bring up the blues in the shadows and midtones and the gold in the highlights. Selective hue and saturation adjustments. Wavelet decompose, and suppression of large detail scales selectively on the surfaces of the board components. Clone of distracting details near the edges of the frame. Resize, and selective sharpen. |
| Author | Thread |
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02/20/2017 02:35:58 AM |
Hello from the critique club
An appealing image that fulfils the challenge brief
You do use some interesting optics Eugene, or in this case, bog standard optics made more interesting. Its an interesting concept that has come out reasonably well considering it was a quick hand-held two exposure blend. You will be the first to recognise its shortcomings but the one that spoils it most for me are the blown highlights from the harsh lighting. Having said that thanks for another interesting entry. |
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 Photographer found comment helpful. |
Comments Made During the Challenge  |
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02/19/2017 06:58:42 PM |
| that's one bad mutherboard |
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02/17/2017 08:09:59 PM |
| Lots of dirt and fluff adhering to a dirty, fluff covered thing. (Seriously, no idea what the thing is.) |
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02/17/2017 06:10:07 PM |
| A computer built by mildew to reverse engineer Lysol. |
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02/17/2017 05:08:40 AM |
| too many bugs prevented this from fulfilling its promise |
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02/15/2017 07:19:15 PM |
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02/15/2017 12:51:25 PM |
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02/15/2017 03:16:54 AM |
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02/14/2017 03:48:21 PM |
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02/14/2017 01:39:55 PM |
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02/14/2017 05:40:11 AM |
| Dust on some electronic circuitry. Bit blown out on the left, though. |
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02/14/2017 02:58:40 AM |
| did u drag an old Circuit Board on carpet? |
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02/13/2017 11:48:51 PM |
| An abandoned circuit board taken over by nanobot squatters. |
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02/13/2017 07:39:48 PM |
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02/13/2017 07:14:52 PM |
something great! USA
a molden chipset |
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02/13/2017 03:52:41 PM |
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02/13/2017 09:13:44 AM |
| Dusty transistor wasteland |
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02/13/2017 05:17:01 AM |
| Dust on an electronic PCB? |
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02/13/2017 05:07:18 AM |
| Is this a really dusty circuit board? |
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| Photographer found comment helpful. |
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