Calling all Photography nerds!

Sasquatchian,
It's easy to get addicted to the stacking process striving to get every mm in focus; I'm not there yet. And the explosion of AI processors is overwhelming, making it very easy to completely distort an image. Agree, additional mini lights, mirrors and reflective card stock can vary and image considerably. The specimens I posted are all of a fair size, pretty much fill the palm of your hand. My goal is to make the specimen look good, but not to be disappointing if you were to see the image and real thing next to each other. That becomes a real balancing act. There is a miniature mineral world, but like everything else requires more specialized equipment. The 2023 "find and dig minerals" season is here for me so the camera will kinda take a second seat for several months.

Cheers

 

Oh, I went back and saw what you did, that’s really nice. I like your macro stacks as well. I haven’t started it yet, but I set up a microscopy stacking setup that I’m hoping to do some fungi specimens and micro fossils with, in addition to micro VR 360’s. And if he hasn’t tried it already, @SeniorSpan should also try doing 360s with those nice mineral shots he’s been doing.

 

I also shoot a lot of images where I only want a range, from here to there, in focus, and then let the rest go out of focus. That range would be more than you could get in a single image even with stopping the lens down (and we can get into why that's a bad idea) but not with everything from front to back in focus. When you do it right it just feels like you did it in one shot but have a nice transition to a beautifully blurred background. Not every image wants to be in full focus. The trick, as always, is figuring out which ones those are. One thing I'll do sometimes is shoot the full depth of the subject but then not process them all, or do one set with all the images and another with a limited subset of the focus slices, just to see what works better.

 

Thank you. It'll be very interesting to see what you do with the photo microscopy.

 

Apologies for the overload. I’ve posted here a few times now but again, nothing fancy, just someone with an iPhone 13 who enjoys photography.
These were taken on our trip to Cali a few weeks ago.

 

SF Bay Area from a plane

 

Black and whites from Recent western trip New Mexico and Utah

 

I think you did a great job documenting your trip through the part of California I grew up in and used your iPhone exactly how it was designed to work. Plus you got to hang out in phenomenally beautiful country.

 

On March the 3rd we lost one of the finest musicians of the last fifty years, David Lindley. Lindley was another loss to (long) covid which brought on kidney failure. Most famous for his stints playing with Jackson Browne in the 1970's and for the high falsetto chorus on Browne's "Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)" from Running on Empty and then with his solo career with his band El-Rayo X, sort of a rock/reggae/L.A. blend that was wholly unique. Lindley positively owned and made his own the song Mercury Blues which became his signature song over the years. He was one of those guys who could and did play pretty much anything with strings, but often ran odd instruments like the Turkish saz through heavy signal processing to change the character to his liking.

I photographed David at his home near Pomona, Ca. back in 1987 for the cover of the long gone Frets Magazine. This is my favorite image from that shoot that i comped into a poster this afternoon after re-scanning it on my old drum scanner. This one was shot on Kodak EPN Ektachrome and a Mamiya RZ67 in the pre digital era. He's playing one of his favorite Bouzouki's here.

 

Smith Rock, OR

 

I'll play and thanks for this.
Zim

 

Well here ya go, spied this Vermilion FlyCatcher coming in and out of a tree - they never expose themselves and are always
amongst the twigs, they don't sit for long, and clear shots are rare. I still try tho.

Nikon D7200/ Sigma100400 ISO800 at 1/400 and F13

 

I love taking photos.

Canon D70
A couple lenses, fluorescent filter, polarizing filter, a tripod.

Samsung S22 Ultra for this one, including editing effects. I was trying to do something fun for the photo contest last week but didn't finish; it is still fun.

'Dog in face'

 

Got a couple new high end mic stands last week, and they're so cool looking that I thought I should document them. This is the first shot that shows the pivot plate where you slip a pin in the hole that lines up with it and that's what keeps the boom in place, not wrenching the knob until you hand falls off. Then there are quick release attachments that attach to the microphone which snap into place on the stand very much in the same way that a compressed air hose attaches to the compressor.

More focus stacking, but of course, but only about 60 frames here, done with the Fuji GFX100s and a Canon 50mm tilt-shift adapted to it. Two soft boxes on either side of the whole contraption and a couple of extra shots at the end hand holding a Fomecore reflector to put reflections into the mic assembly, which, btw, is a Lauten Audio Eden 386 large diameter tube mic. My favorite mic and what a mic it is. The same mic that David Crosby and Cardi B used on their recent records, for opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

 

OBX: Duck, NC

 

Nice work. Nice stand.

 

Nice shot. Handheld? - wonder what it could have been at like 10 seconds.
Looks like a great possible shot with fog rolling in at some point as well.

 

Thanks!
That was an iPhone 12 - wish I had my camera with me.

 

Pretty new to photography but always have been interested.

Canon 70D 75-300mm