Peacock Feathers

We recently stayed at our friends' beautiful country house and I had a little time to shoot around the property, finding some neat little things I'll post here in the coming days.

One part-time resident of the farmhouse is a peacock who wanders on and off the yard occasionally, eating Scott's lavender. The peacock has left many of his stunning feathers around the place, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to shoot them and see what makes them shine like they do.

The photo above is of an area about an inch wide. I then zoomed in for the photo below, which is an area about 5mm wide. The individual strands of feather (called barbs) appear to be metallic themselves, and made of little sections.

What follows are a few more microphotos of the different parts of the peacock feather. Some look like christmas garland or pine tree branches to me; more amazing evidence of nature's incredible symmetry and cohesiveness, or its lack of imagination. Depends on your viewpoint.

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Stay Sharp, Pencil Pusher

These are closeups of a metal manual prism pencil sharpener. It's about an inch long. The photo above is a portion of the hole where the pencil goes in.

Below is a portion of the brand debossed into the metal body of the sharpener. I like the graphic look of the letters. Note how the very limited depth of field at this level of magnification crosses from the highest point inside the "g" topographically, to the lowest part of the "r" canyon floor. In other words, I can only keep details sharp if they are within about 1/2 a millimeter depth from the lens. This is one of the biggest challenges of shooting tiny things like this on such a micro scale.

The photo below is the sharpener blade. You can see microscopic bits of pencil lead and wax shavings leftover from a previous meal.

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Pinpoint

This the the pin, stuck into the skin of my thumb. I know, it's kind of gross, but I wanted to see what it would look like.

Below is the pin point, without my thumb. Below that is a closer crop of the tip.

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Hoboken Studio Tour/Tiny Lab: Money, Money, Money, Mo-ney

Above, you're being watched by Lincoln' eye, from a $5 bill. You can see the cotton fibers of the paper, and even a little shine off the ink where it's adhered to the fibers. Being a bit of a printing geek, I am intrigued by the amount of detail in the line art on this bill. It was shot on request at my exhibit during the Hoboken Studio Tour.

Below are two gold coins with ridged edges that look cool close up. One coin was from South Africa, and one was from the US, and they live together in the wallet of one of my visitors from the Studio Tour.

In case you missed it, here are some photos from my Tiny Lab exhibit the day of the Studio Tour. And if you are curious, here is a slideshow the photos I ultimately hung for that exhibition.

Thanks again for all your encouragement and support!

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Hoboken Studio Tour/Tiny Lab: Edible, Not Edible

The image above is a microphoto of a Twizzler candy which I shot for some kids at my show. I didn't know these were full of bubbles!

Below is the edge of a Tootsie Roll wrapper, made of aluminum foil and a plastic coating. In blue at the bottom are silica gel pellets, also shot for a kid visiting show. DO NOT EAT!

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Hoboken Studio Tour/Tiny Lab: Diamonds, Tough as Nails

The diamond above was on the ring of a visitor to my Tiny Lab exhibit in the Hoboken Studio Tour. It is an antique and supposedly some kind of special cut. Being that I'm not a gemologist (if that's a word) I have no way of knowing just how special the cut is.

I do, however, find the diamond very beautiful, and am fascinated by the facets and patterns created by them. Amazing.

Below is a square nailhead in the floor. It's been ground down by floor refinishing. Lucky for us, that makes an interesting pattern of scuffs that refract and scatter light into little prismatic rainbows.

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Just a Flashlight

I just thought this turned out kind of beautiful. It's really a very plain macro photo of the reflective cone inside a flashlight. The patterns fascinate me and I like it's sense of luminance.

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Peach Fuzz, and the Knife to Slice it

That's pretty much all I got to say about that. You've got some of your basic peach fuzz up there (V says, "I wike da futhz"), and your basic sharpened chef's knife edge below. If you look close enough, the little fuzz strands are clear.

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Money is for Nuthin' and the Chicks for Free

I will pay you to "follow" my blog. OK, not really, but here's some money in macro.

These are two macro photos of a nickel, looking HUGE! I like how the details in the rim of the coin above makes it appear to be carved from rock. And the shot below looks like mercury, teased into a form to mimic trees.

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Hardware Day!

A wood screw tip.

Today, I shot some hardware. You can see some optical distortion in the photo below, as the screw threads seem to bend inward the further they get from the center of my lens. This is an artifact of my janky stack of lenses, and would not be present were I using a far better lens.

Another screw tip, slightly distorted.

Below, not suspension bridge cable, rather the frayed end of thin-gauge picture hanging wire.

Picture hanging wire.

A nail tip.

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Solid Gold Ice, Ice, Baby

This image of ice bubbles is very fluid, very painterly. It's one of my very early ones.

I've left you people -- all 3 of my readers and one follower (yay! thanks Jaime) -- without an ice photo for a while now. I couldn't help myself. So here you go. Back to bugs, spices, and other odds 'n' ends next post.

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Balls of Steel: tiny, but still imposing

The ball of a ball whisk. The dealeos at the end of a thing like this.

I don't know what kind of specialized mixing and whisking this type of whisk is used for. I have scrambled eggs and whisked hollandaise with this whisk. I imagine it's good for things that need connective blobs squished apart (like eggs), and the inertial velocity of the metal balls helps break that up?

I am particularly surprised at the detail of the scratches all along the surface of this subject. And the chasms and deformations, stained with either old food particles or rust... I swear it looks clean and gleaming and sanitary from a normal perspective. But close up, this approximately 5mm steel ball looks like something out of The Running Man.

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