Posts Tagged ‘macro’
cubits wide
More macro comestibles, in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described in a couple of posts from last week (this, and that), a humble narrator is making productive use of the hermitage forced upon him by the cold weather by experimentation with macro lens photography. The subject matter for this pursuit has almost exclusively been food based, and in the case of what you see in today’s post – it’s a true fruit and a drupe, not berries which are commonly referred to as fruit like banana or citrus.
The circumstance of the shots utilizes a jury rigged lighting set up which includes the usage of a powerful flash placed behind the subject, which allows for some of the internal structure of the food stuffs to be revealed. It’s all somewhat complicated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
First up on the stage are apples, specifically two of them, and I’ll be damned if I can tell you exactly which one of the 7,500 breeds of the thing they are – they’re red apples which I bought at the bodega across the street from my house is all I can tell you. The nice thing about this sort of project is that in addition to providing for an interesting technical challenge which produces somewhat intriguing results, it also results in a series of tasty and healthy snacks for a narrator to enjoy when the work is done.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Apples and humans have been together a long time. Literal interpreters of certain holy texts will tell you that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil consumed by Adam and Eve was an apple, but that’s largely because of a translation era. There’s also the Nordic tradition of the Golden Apples of Idunn, which supplied Odin, Loki, and the rest of that crew with immortality. Heracles had twelve labors, and acquiring the golden apples found at the Garden of the Hesperides was one.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Malus domestica is the botanical classification for all 7,500 kinds of domesticated apple, which have been bred out from a wild ancestor native to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang that is called Malus sieversii. It’s believed that the original cultivation of apples as a crop began in China’s Tian Shan mountains in prehistoric times. Apples are produced by a deciduous tree which is part of the same botanical family that produces Roses and Plums, amongst other useful things.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that China is the world’s apple superpower, producing roughly half of the worldwide annual 80 million ton harvest of the fruit. Apples are nearly twice as genetically complex as human beings, and unlike humans, if you store them under the right conditions you can count on them staying fresh for months. The Granny Smith and Fuji variants can be kept viable in storage for nearly a year under tightly controlled circumstance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Apples were brought to the Americas by European colonists in the 17th century, and the first orchard on the continent was in Boston. The schoolboy mythology version of American history claims that Johnny Appleseed distributed cultivars of Apples to far flung homesteads. The reality was that John Chapman was a Swedenborgian missionary, who maintained a far flung apple tree nurseries business, who would just show up on your property and try to convert you to the “New Church.” He would distribute individual sections of the bible to people he visited, operating a one chapter at a time library service for pioneers. Chapman would also try to talk the farmers he met into partnering with him on an apple nursery planted on their property.
The esoteric side of Swedenborgian thought opined that if if you could create a society that operated in the manner of an orchard, it would be producing better citizen and parishioner fruit than you could by letting them grow wild. Later adherents of the philosophy would popularize and institutionalize into education a tenet of their faith, and if you attended Kindergarten then you’ve experienced it.
Swedenborgian Kindergarden – American Child Orchard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shot above looks right down where the stem of the fruit connected to the branch. My “under” flash was set to maximum power and “throw” to illuminate the otherwise lightfast skin and flesh of the fruit. I’ve received a couple of comments about the prior posts that there’s a “Georgia O’Keefe” sort of sexual vibe going on with some of these shots, btw.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Technically speaking, these are the sex organs of a life form, so… probably not far off. I’ve always been interested in the visual similarity of various animal body parts to analogous organs found in the plant world. My opinion on the subject has always been that evolution is a somewhat lazy beast, and that certain anatomical configurations were figured out very early in the game and have been widely transmitted as the various clades diverged from each other. Someday, science will describe certain shapes and structures as being distinctly terrestrial – presuming we have something else to compare earthly life to in a clinical setting.
Either that, or it’s the same mechanism of the human brain which renders a passing cloud as either a winged dragon or a unicorn and sees recognizable shapes in otherwise random patterns, which is called pareidolia.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned above, Plums also belong to the Rosales or Rose family, just like apples. A taxonomist will argue about the number of plum species there are, but the presumption is that there are something like 20-40 individual variants. Commercially available plums are a different story, with most of the Plums we eat originate from either the European plum (Prunus domestica) or the Japanese plum (Prunus salicina).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Plums aren’t fruits, unlike apples, instead they’re drupes. They’ve been domesticated by humans since Neolithic times. If you spot a stand of Prunus domestica in the woods of the Caucasian Montains of Eastern Europe, you’ve got a good candidate spot for archaeologists and paleontologists to poke at.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the things I’m trying to do with these macro experiments is to find a way to do an “x-ray view.” This requires a bit of “studio-fu.” The shot above is the same basic setup as the one below, with the difference between them being that in the one above, I left a lamp on that flooded the lens facing section of the plum with light. This reveals surface details and true color.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the “x-ray view” above, the lamp was turned off after about a second. When the big flash underneath the Plum went off, all that light went traveling straight up through the thing, revealing all the internal structure. Haven’t quite perfected this procedure yet, but intriguing – ain’t it?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shots above and below are long exposures, coupled with that flash traveling up through the Plum to reveal the internal structure of the skin.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The one above is my favorite of the plum series, mainly because you see both exterior and interior of the thing simultaneously. I had to jump through a few digital hoops developing these things, incidentally, as my improvised lighting and flash set up hopelessly confused the camera.
I’ll be doing more of this kind of thing periodically, as I’m having a lot of fun, and eating a lot of fruit.
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vine encumbered
It’s “something completely different day” in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady of the Pentacle has been exercising her green thumb since the late spring, and we have quite a cucumber patch situation in one of the flower boxes out on said porch. Our Lady is an early riser, whereas your humble narrator is not, so one recent evening after she had retired to the boudoir, I was found out on the porch. Astoria is somewhat infested with rats, and given the abundance of cucumbers found hereabouts, a rustling in the patch caused me to grab a flashlight and inspect. While doing so, and it was just the wind btw, it occurred that it would be cool to stick a camera down in the pot and see what I could see.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My trusty old Canon G10 has a fantastic macro lens function on it, but the device’s weaknesses have always been most apparent in low light situations. Luckily, one of my flash guns has a “slave” function built into it, which triggers it when another camera flash is actuated within a certain visual range of its sensor.
Accordingly, the secondary flash was positioned at the far end of the vine, and the G10’s onboard flash (which is pathetic, but adequate for the task at hand) activated.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The G10 was outfitted with a remote cable release, and its menu of options set up, whereupon I sat it down on the soil deep within Our Lady’s flower trough. A little bit of noodling on the settings was called for, and eventually, the correct combination of instructions were encoded into both the capture device and external flash gun. Did I mention that these shots were captured well after midnight and in somewhat complete darkness?
Also, I never knew that cucumbers were covered in little hypodermic needles when immature.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Encouraged by my results in the first few shots, I ran inside and grabbed another bit of photographic kit, a clamp with a tripod’s ball head built into it and used the same technique to shoot down into the vine at some of the maturing fruit. In some of these shots, like the one above, you can actually see worms emerging from the recently watered soil. I plan on exploring this approach in the future, presuming that some urban farmer will allow me access to their planting beds at night.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One realizes that botanical macro shots aren’t exactly par for the course here at your Newtown Pentacle, but since I couldn’t stop looking at them, it was decided to share them in today’s rather late in the day post.
Also, for all of you who donated money to the camera fund last week, I cannot express my gratitude. I will at some point in the near future, incidentally, when my financial life isn’t quite as rugged. Like the Grinch confronted by Mary Lou Who, my heart grew two sizes due to your generosity and support.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Upcoming Tours –
July 26th, 2015
Modern Corridor – LIC, Queens Walking Tour
with Brooklyn Brainery, click here for details and tickets.
As detailed in this recent post, my camera was destroyed in an accident.
For those of you who have offered donations to pay for its replacement, the “Donate” button below will take you to paypal. Any contributions to the camera fund will be greatly appreciated, and rewarded when money isn’t quite as tight as it is at the moment.
adding to
Even when I’m home, shit happens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
So, I’m sitting on the porch with the dog recently, when a fly lands on a table we keep outside. The fly looks at me, all haughty like, and proceeds to squeeze out this yellowish blob from what would be, on a mammal, its buttocks. You never know with insects, but if something came out of the analogous section of the dog…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Curious as to what this yellowish blob was, I grabbed my camera and soon discovered that it was beyond the limited “macro” focusing that my lineup of glass could capture. Macro photography is its own “thing” and is an area which I’m not really set up to explore. Therefore, I had to get all inventive.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a quick trip to my desk for equipment – acquiring a small jewelers loupe and a pencil – I had set up a quickie magnifier for the fly goop. What I was hoping for was that was some sort of squamous egg cartridge which be sprouting worms, but I think it might have just been fly poop.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Obviously, this is far from a perfect situation – optical fidelity wise – shooting with an expensive lens through a cheap magnifying lens. There is a trick to this, one which involves disabling autofocus on the expensive glass attached to the camera. The camera desperately wanted to lock onto to the front of the loupe’s lens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The trick is to get the focal point of the image set for the point in space at which the magnifying loupe was focused, as you see in the shot above. An interesting exercise, but I didn’t get any little worms as I hoped. Regardless, I doused the thing with Lysol and went along my merry way. The dog slept through the whole thing, but she’s a honey badger when you really get down to it.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
There are two Newtown Creek walking tours coming up.
Saturday, July 26th, The Insalubrious Valley of the Newtown Creek
With Atlas Obscura, lunch included, click here for tickets and more info.
Sunday, July 27th, Glittering Realms
With Brooklyn Brainery, lunch included, click here for tickets and more info.
The Newtown Pentacle 