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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Brown Leather Bag

This is leather. In actuality, it's not particularly shiny or anything... just a regular old floppy leather bag. But light does funny things, and when viewed at this level of magnification, leather becomes this shiny, scaly landscape.

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Homage to How It's Made: Broken Stick End, Holiday Ribbon, Bread Tab Printing

I love the simple, eclectic, postmodern-consumer poetry of the How It's Made episode descriptions in my Tivo guide. "How It's Made 5- Episode 4: Javelins, Cuckoo Clocks, Hearts of Palm, Windshield Wipers."

"Stuffed Olives, Astrolabes, Western Saddles."
"Pencils, Metal Recycling, Coffee."
"Sails, Walnuts, Wheel Immobilizers, Honeycomb Structural Panels."
"Giant Valves, Sardines, Barographs, Disposable Diapers."
"Accordions, Pineapples, Artificial Joints."

It's just too awesome. The items in these lists never go together. The production of the show is no-nonsense. It doesn't attempt to tell any story beyond what steps are necessary to manufacture the subject. The musical accompaniment sounds like simple muzak from the bonus CD in your Cheerios box. The show could not be done any more perfectly and I love it exactly like it is.

So, I'm going to try to imitate the How It's Made descriptions with my next several posts. I am not consciously trying to put incongruent items together, I'm just grabbing what I've got and posting. They might all be bugs or not. They might all be man-made or not. Doesn't matter. But they are simply the product of me taking what I've got and putting it out there.

Broken Stick End, Holiday Ribbon, Bread Tab Printing

Above we have the broken end of a stick, which was about 8mm wide in total. You can observe the xylem and phloem holes, through which would course the water, sap, and other nourishment the tree needs to grow. You can also see the fuzzy pulpiness of the wood toward the left side. We've seen paper pulp before, so here it is before processing.

Below is a microphoto of shiny holiday ribbon. This particular one was a translucent piece of ribbon, and unexpectedly (or maybe not in retrospect) the threads of the ribbon are clear. Pretty cool. You can also see how it is made of a simple woven pattern of these threads. I'm guessing they are acrylic.

At the bottom we have a number which had been printed on the closure tab for a loaf of bread. You know, those little plastic dealies you crimp on after twisting the extra bread bag closed? I shot the number because I like numbers and I like printing, and found this particular printing process left a cool texture within the number.

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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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More Bubbles in Streaming Tap Water

I have consistently received such a positive, surprised, and delighted response from my previous tap water photo, that I decided to shoot a few more for kicks. So here you go, tap water fans. Drink up.

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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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If I had a nickel for every time I heard that

More closeups of a nickel. Once again, there are no hard edges in the small world. No lines. Everything is round-edged, round cornered, lumpy, chipped, dented. This looks like a coin unearthed from the ancient Romans, but it's just one of our US coins, only 10 or 20 years of wear has beaten it to this condition.

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Fly Me to the Moon, or Right Into a Lightbulb, if You're a Moth

And here come the creepier crawlers!

Above is the face of a moth. This was a rather small moth, actually. A larger moth would have had a larger head with more "feathers" and bigger eyes. However, I am happy with this shot anyway, because it's pretty much in sharp focus. Which is hard for such a tiny thing.

In other tiny-things-in-sharp-focus news, below is some sort of fly on a leaf. Maybe I'll find it's actually a bee and have to correct it like my last post.

One interesting detail I noticed is the little fly feet. I guess I've never seen or noticed what fly feet look like. Take a look at them, they're two little claw things, and two sticky pads. This particular fly appears to be missing the claw/pads on its left middle leg.

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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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Bubbles in Water

These teensy tiny bubbles were stuck to the side of my glass of water. Not a carbonated beverage, which tends to have larger bubbles, these are the result of water sloshing around while filling the glass.

They're very small, ranging from about a half to a whole millimeter each. I am particularly pleased with how silvery and metallic they look, refracting everything through them they look like highly reflective orbs. If I had been setting up the shot more carefully (this was just a drive by shooting), I would have placed something with an interesting pattern behind them for a really cool effect. I'll do that in a future photo and post the result.

Just a program note, I will be heading off to Project M Sunday, so I may or may not be posting for the next two weeks. Depends on my availability and connectivity, of course. Should be a great experience.

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I Eye Captain.

So this one is kinda creepy, I know. Yes, it's my eye.

This is actually the third macro shoot I've done to try and get a good photo of an iris. There are all sorts of neat little folds and details in that muscle that makes up the iris, I wanted to capture it. This picture turned out to be more about the reflections and the overall eye instead.

I've shot my own eye twice, and once Sarah volunteered. But she didn't care much for the claustrophobia-inducing closeness of the lens, and it was a quick shoot. I will try to bribe her to do it again, because I saw something really interesting in the differences between our irises.

Besides the basic color differences (me brown, her green), my irises as you can see above, sort of look like thick dough. Alternately, Sarah's green irises looked like thousands of wavy green threads arranged radially. The difference is very interesting. I'll post a comparison in the future.

In other eye trivia, the eye's lens is the only place on our bodies which is not oxygenated by blood, rather, it gets oxygen directly from the air. Contact lenses have micro perforations in them that allow the air to still contact enough of the eye to keep it healthy. This is one reason why cleaning your contacts is important, to keep those tiny holes from clogging up.

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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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When planet-sized dried berries attack

This photo is from the same bunch of berries you saw in the January 5 post, "Dried Berries." You can see the effect of stacking my lenses and combining them with the macro filter on my camera, which I mentioned last post.

This berry looks like a planet compared to the previous berry post where the bunch resembles, well, red meatballs. The dust (those little hairy things) is even more apparent in this shot than the previous one. I've found shooting tiny stuff that there is dust absolutely everywhere. It sometimes takes a little more work than you expected to get a clean shot with no dust.

I've read that dust is made up of clothing and furniture fibers, dead skin cells (we shed them like snakeskins in a wood chipper) and insect parts. Fly eyes, dead mites, etc... Apparently pillows double their volume of dust mites every year. I might have made that up.

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Mimi's wool winter cap

Today, I adapted my lens by "stacking" another lens with it in order to gain greater magnification. This is the result.

I had been capturing an area about 22mm wide with my previous setup. Now I'm getting about 8-9mm (with a little cropping due to an unfortunate vignette effect).

This is a shot of the fibers of Mimi's winter cap up close. I think that large white line is a dog hair, courtesy of Dash. What you find as you look at smaller and smaller things, is that there are no sharp and hard lines. Everything is a rounded edge at some lower limit, and it sometimes makes for difficult edge clarity in a shot like this.

These fibers appear to be oval, and semi-translucent, making them show up less sharp than I would like. Though this could also be an undesirable effect of my stacked lens which would not be present in a far better lens.

EDIT: OK, so I have an edit to this one. Not only was I wrong about the material (it's acrylic), but I was wrong about its ownership (it's Violet's). The hat, however, is still actually blue-green.

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Streaming tap water, captured in high-speed

Another type of photography that fascinates me (there are so many!) is high-speed photography. In this case, I've shot a macro semi-high-speed photo of water streaming out of the tap.

What I found with this shot was how the stream of water was completely filled with bubbles. And it seems like such a strange idea that water moving so fast from the tap could be so filled with bubbles. And they look so big too! So diamond-like and sparkly.

If I didn't know what this was, I would never have guessed that it's simply tap water.

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More Ice Bubble Ornaments

This is one of the earlier ice photos that really inspired me to explore tiny things more and in greater detail. I found these bubbles and reflections so abstract and beautiful, I couldn't stop looking through what I'd captured.

I love the geometric light reflections in this shot, and the ridiculously ornamental bubbles (only a millimeter or less each) were fascinating in all their bizarre organic shapes.

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Goodbye Christmas

Putting away Christmas decorations, I took a couple parting shots of details on our items. These are the tiny clear beads which are adhered to the side of a wax pine tree candle to make it shimmer.

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Glitter

Glitter on a Christmas ornament, up close. Like a million tiny mirrors.

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Ornaments

More bubbles in ice that look like Christmas ornaments; a seasonal photo for the Morning Macro photo blog.

I also like the explosive look of this one, the bubbles look like they've been ejected from the right of the frame, when in reality, they are literally frozen there. Fascinating that the ice froze over a period of time, not in an instant, and the result is still so active and expressive.

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