The dreaded clutch of SoFoBoMo
I decided that with a new kid on the scene, I wasn’t going to do SoFoBoMo this year. But then I came up with a pretty cool idea that I liked… yeah, I’m doing it again.
This year I’m only taking pictures with my homemade macro lens. Oh yeah, it’s even more ghetto than it sounds. I’m trying to arrange for someone to take a picture of it because I can’t take a picture of it with my camera. Since it’s basically a surplus lens assembly from Axman shoved into a piece of cardboard, I liberally taped it to my camera body with paper tape. This means I have no idea when I’m going to attach my regular lens to my camera again. It’s getting frustrating not being able to take pictures of Henry and Caroline. But taking the lens on and off is a major undertaking which requires much tape. So I’m kind of motivated to get this thing done with.
I was going to do contact sheets again, but I just imported my photos and realized I took over 400 photos yesterday alone. For context, last year I took a little over 1000 total shots, for the entire month. Phew, 400 shots a day; that’s too much, and mostly it’s because the homemade macro lens doesn’t auto focus, and it has razor thin depth of field, and that wind blowing everything around is a real pain, so I find myself taking 10, 15, 20 shots of one scene just to try to get one that’s in focus.
I’ll try to think of something to post about and maybe get an example up or an experiment that didn’t work. In the meantime, here are the three photos that got me thinking about it:
Looks kind of like a bunny rabbit.
This is actually an experimental edit; it’s far too dark. I think Meriska’s eye needs to be lighter. I just forgot to reset and re-edit before I exported. (And now I’m too lazy because it’s not that great of a composition anyway).
Leaning toward including this one in the book. (GASP — I’m telling you editorial decisions ALREADY, gosh, this openness is scary).
May 19th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
heres what you do. insead of taping it to your camera find yourself a spare body cap. apply JB weld to attach lens creation to body cap. now you have a macro lens that you can take off the camera when want to use a different lens. I suggest this with only a vauge idea what your creation looks like….
May 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
“Razor thin depth-of-field”? Welcome to macro photography. As someone who shoots almost entirely with a macro lens, I’ve always been shocked when you mentioned that you want lenses that have something like a f1.2 aperture. I’m more of an f22 man myself.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Last time I used a macro lens heavily it was on the coolpix 4500; with the smaller sensor it meant the dof issue wasn’t as bad.
f1.2 is great because the camera gets more light for autofocusing, even if you have to stop down to f2.0 for dof. You know, speaking as a person who usually takes more photos after dark than when it’s light out.