Coriander Seed Balloon Ascension

I love how this looks like a balloon ascension, from below, just after the children have released their balloons to the sky.

These coriander seeds were so much more beautiful than I had expected them to be. With the gentle wavy fluting around each seed, their detail is delicate and subtle.

I think the alterations I made to my lighting setup for this shot helped to really make this photo stand out too. In this photo, and some others I will post soon, I have a light source above and below the subject, and catch a bounce off some side reflectors as well. The amount and quality of light in a photo tends to determine its success, often much more than framing, composition, color, focus, etc.

In this case, it definitely worked out well, I think.

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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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A Forest of Toothbrush Bristles

Toothbrush bristles, looking like otherworldly bottom-of-the-sea creatures that feast on plaque.

The white cruddy stuff on the tips of the bristles is dried toothpaste. That's what I'm telling myself. Come on, I can't post a clean, fresh, new toothbrush... a used one is so much more fun.

I haven't looked at other toothbrushes, but I would imagine that they too have rounded bristle ends, for comfort. These look rubbery and thick in the photo, but I assure you that these are the standard, regular old thin plasticky bristles just like on your toothbrush.

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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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Ice Flows, or Maybe Not

Time for another ice photo. I know Sarah (my wife) is tired of these, but it's because she's been seeing them for years. So I discount her opinion on the ice photos as biased.

I was intrigued by the way this one turned out, as it looks like bubbles being poured from a very transparent pitcher. In fact, these bubbles were trapped in the ice in that formation making them appear to be in motion. This is one of the reasons I love shooting the ice, these photos can reveal something sculptural and familiar (christmas ornaments, chandeliers, a sunrise, insect eggs, etc.) among the abstract patterns and random currents of the freezing ice.

I'll post one that looks like fish swimming upstream sometime soon, for all you ice fans out there.

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Dried Bay Leaves, in need of anti-aging cream

In keeping with the spices and seasonings theme, here is a photo of the underside of a dried bay leaf. I hadn't expected so much detail to be visible, and I'm quite impressed by what we can see at this level of magnification.

You can see an enlarged section of the bay leaf below. This is blown up to almost a 1:1 pixel ratio to what was captured by the camera. See what I mean about sharp lines being nonexistant in the tiny world?

I've figured out my magnification level, in case anyone was interested. My hacked-together lens setup is getting me roughly 6x magnification from what we see with our eyes. Now, keep in mind, that number is related to the sensor size in my camera, meaning that the lenses are enlarging the subject 6x from reality and that is the image I snap with my camera. So the 800 pixel wide images you see here in my blog (the enlargement directly above not included) at roughly 175mm (depending on your computer's display) are about 8x the size of my camera sensor.

This puts the true enlargement of my photos here on the MorningMacro at 19.4x the size they are in real life.

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Liquid Crystal Displays, up close and personal

Macbook LCD pixels at high magnification.

I had shot the LCD on my laptop (above) to see what the pixels look like. As expected, each pixel on your and my display are composed of three components, a red, a green and a blue, which together make white (when all are on), black (when all are off) and every color in between (at least to the human eye). You can also see how dirty my screen is. Gotta clean that.

To my surprise, the components that make up each pixel are vertical rectangles, as you can see. I don't know much about LCD pixel configurations, but I was also intrigued by the way each pixel component appeared to be comprised of a long piece and a short piece. This could simply be a visual affect of some sort of circuit overlay that makes them appear to be two pieces. They also have very real little shapes, with an angled corner. Interesting.

Curious, I took some shots of other LCDs around. Below is a closeup of the display on the back of a pocket digital snapshot camera. You can see the pixels are smaller, and more square, though they still appear to be segmented in some way. You can also see that the designers of this display below weren't as concerned with the "squareness" of the visual pixel created by the combination of the three colored components. The red, green, and blue together make a long rectangular pixel rather than a square one. Also in this example, there is evidence of some visual distortion due to the anti-glare coating on the screen, which was not present on the laptop example above.

Canon Elph pocket camera LCD at high magnification.

In the next example below, I've shot the pixels of our LCD TV, which you can see are much larger (detail isn't as important on a TV since you sit further away) sending much brighter light out to the viewers than the smaller pixels do. You can also see that the these big honkin' pixel elements are "divided" in halves, though again this could be a visual effect of having some sort of circuit overlaid on the pixels.

Also, the anti-glare coating distortion is much more prominent on this example than on the previous one. The distortion looks oddly similar to compression artifacts or distortion induced from extreme up-sampling of an image (which this is not). But I assure you, this was absolutely in focus, and you are seeing the image as untainted by post-processing as possible. All three of these LCD pixel images are the same aspect ratio and crop factor, meaning they haven't been changed in size relative to eachother in any way.

Now I expect all three of my readers will be squinting at every display around them for the next few days, trying to see what's in there.

Sharp Aquos LCD television pixels at high magnification.

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Superpost: 6 Seasons in Macro

Just your typical black pepper.

I've shot some spices and seasonings to compare their makeup. It's interesting seeing differences that aren't immediately apparent with the naked eye. For instance, the pepper above is gnarly and big. Being a dried berry of the pepper plant, it's skin is similar to that of the dried wrinkly berry from the previous post. Though smaller, blacker, and crispier.

Below is a look at more seasonings. See how the sugar and the salt are composed of completely different kinds of crystals? The sugar crystals are prism-like and often well formed little geometric shapes. Whereas the salt is sort of chippy, like chipped ice or something. Try rubbing the two between your fingers separately, and see if you can feel the difference in their structures. The sugar may feel more rolling, and the salt may feel more slippy, like all those tiny plates sliding against eachother. The difference is very subtle with such small forms, however.

I've also posted a shot of cinnamon, which, according to this report, is one of the 10 best foods for your health that you're not eating. I, of course, am eating it because it's freaking delicious on toast. Just not every day.

Also further below are red pepper (ground cayenne) and crowd-pleasing curry.

Just regular old white sugar.

Just plain old sodium chloride... er, salt.

Tasty, and apparently good-for-you cinnamon.

Firey ground cayenne pepper powder.

Delicious curry powder.

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