Cubism

Forehead

Regular old table salt, nine-frame stack.

Art Scott

Very cool shot.....what did you use to get THAT close....that is much closer than normal macro.....

Again very good.

handlebar

I too would also like to know how you did that. That is awesome thanks for the post.

Skippy

Forehead wrote:

Regular old table salt, nine-frame stack.

Try some sugar it has some really nice shapes, almost looks like gemstones, similar to the salt, but I think you would like the sugar shapes a lot
Good shot.......... Skippy (Australia)

Forehead

I've used the same technique as described in 'The Flea'.

Thanks for the kind comments!

handlebar wrote:

I too would also like to know how you did that. That is awesome thanks for the post.

Forehead

As described earlier in 'The Flea' (but a bit more expounded now), here's my set-up:

• Canon Powershot A520, zoomed (optically) all the way out;
• A 25mm eyepiece off of a 4-inch Meade reflecting telescope, used upside down (it just happens to fit nicely on the inner lens barrel of the camera;
• A lens element off of a Ray Enterprises 10X loupe (bought for $10 at a Ritz camera store), which fits nicely in the little rubber eye cup of that eyepiece;
• all this mounted on the bottom of a cheap plastic Tasco microscope, with the objective lenses removed and a stage placed there instead--this makes sort of a macro rail for fairly precise focusing.

The camera settings used were:

• Manual aperture set at f/8 (the minimum obtainable with most point/shoot and prosumer digital cameras, used for more depth of field);
• ISO 50 (for the minimum amount of noise possible)
• No flash, but a 50-watt faceted halogen floodlight used instead;
• Manual focus set as close as it would go (as the macro rail is doing all the work--letting the camera focus would likely not produce the frames needed for the right focus stacking effects)

The subject was held vertically under the floodlight between 2 and 6 inches, with the same orientation after each focus step to minimize shadow meandering. The lens assembly is between 3/8 and 1/2 inch from the subject.

After taking all the shots I wanted, I removed the end shots that tended to be a little out of focus, and ran the rest through Alan Hadley's CombineZM stacking software (www.hadleyweb.com, for your free copy--he'd like to be mentioned whenever using the software). Any other edits can be done with whatever you have after stacking.

I wish I had all this KEWL stuff 25 or so years ago!

Art Scott wrote:

Very cool shot.....what did you use to get THAT close....that is much closer than normal macro.....

Again very good.

Forehead

What? Are you NOT being treated "sweet" enough where you're at?

Skippy wrote:

Try some sugar it has some really nice shapes, almost looks like gemstones, similar to the salt, but I think you would like the sugar shapes a lot
Good shot.......... Skippy (Australia)

Awais Yaqub

Wonderful megnification

Forehead

Now I also have a 9mm eyepiece for that 4-inch reflecting telescope. I had wanted to try that instead of the 25mm eyepiece but thought that vignetting would be a miserable problem. However, I ended up with virtually NONE when zoomed all the way out. But some precision focus help my stacks now, with such shallow DOFs.

Anyway, here's how salt crystals look NOW (five-frame stack, a little unsharp mask but NO crop):