Painterly, Intricate Lacework

I've had my first downtime in what seems like months, and had the opportunity to shoot at our friends' country house which previously yielded microphotos of Peacock Feathers and BeeBalm [Monarda] flowers. Luckily for me, the old farmhouse windows iced up dramatically in the recent bitterly cold wind and snow, and these intricate, beautiful patterns emerged overnight.

The size of the photos presented here don't do these pictures justice—they really should be turned into huge prints and hung as modern art (hint, hint). Maybe as an early Valentine's gift for your honey?

But to really show how much detail was contained in these iced windows, in an area about the size of a quarter, below is a cropped portion of the photo from above, followed by several more photos of the icy panes.

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Ice Fishies

Just a quick post today. This is one of my favorite ice bubble photos that I've taken. I was lucky to have the opportunity to see it printed huge for an installation I did at the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. It looks great huge (60" x 90") as well as on screen!

To me, this looks like a photo of fish swimming up a stream.

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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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Yeast, Aluminum Packaging, Kitchen Table

The objects above are not teeth. They are dry baking yeast nubs, the kind that come in a little foil package. I didn't know what to expect when I shot them, and this is what I got! Weird world.

Below is a shot of the edge of the foil packet the yeast came in. Further below is a slightly wider shot of the same section of the yeast package.

Here we have a piece of our kitchen table, it's formica or something. If you look very close, there appear to be tiny threads within the white textured resin of this tabletop. I suppose this might be made in a process similar to fiberglass, whereby a fiber and resin mixture is molded and dried.

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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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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: Watch Closely

The watch hands above were on the watch of a visitor to my Tiny Lab exhibit in the Hoboken Studio Tour. I like the dreamy quality of the light and the way the scratches and dust create haloed sparkles throughout the image.

The two photos below are other parts of the watch which have obviously been much loved. The texture of scuffs is great, and I love the little flecks of gold peeking through the layer of silver.

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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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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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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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Soda Bubbles, and How They Attach to the Glass

I was asked why the water bubbles in my previous post aren't flat on one side where they are attached to the side of the glass.

The bubbles you see above were photographed in a glass of Sprite; sugary carbonated beverage. I shot a bunch of photos of these bubbles, which were larger than the ones available in a glass of water. Only one-ish of the photos was focused in a way that shows the pad of bubble attached to the side of the glass. I'm guessing that it's a hard thing to get spot on focus with since I've seen it so rarely.

Clearly, you can see that these bubbles are not merely half spheres hanging out in there. Rather, they are complete spheres with a little bit attached to the glass, holding it in place. And the attachment is not simply flat, but kind of veiny and weird. Perhaps that structure is what creates a sort of suction that holds the bubble in place.

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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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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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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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Glitter

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

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Silver Drop

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

More water on leaves. I love how the background turned out in this one. Nothing special was done to the photo in post-processing, the colors and focus is accurate to how it was captured.

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