059: Popcorn Flock

However appetising this popcorn looks, I assure you it's way out of date. And it's been used as packaging material in a box of highly-scented toiletries, so it's perfumed now as well. Scented popcorn is a good thing, but not to eat, I'm guessing.
These exploded grains have fascinating unique forms, so I've been stuck a bunch on cocktail sticks, upright on pieces of plasticine. I've also kept one aside that looks like an octopus... It's almost like cloud-spotting. I noticed another that resembled a pitcher plant.

Settings: f/8, 1/6 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42, 11mm extension, flourescent lamp, white paper under front of subject.

058: Star Anise

The star anise was blu-tacked onto a sheet of glass, supported at an angle and parallel with the camera.
It's a very spare composition, but the strong shape and mix of textures are attention-grabbing.

Settings: f/9, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M4, 19mm extension, low flash, foil above, beige paper behind and white paper underneath.

057: Tubers of Destiny

How about that for an excellent post title? I've been thinking about growing delicious Jerusalem Artichokes in the garden for a year now, but I missed the opportunity last year. These tubers have a rich, earthy smell, which reminds me that I should plant them out as soon as possible. Their skin has a layered look that reminds me of eddoes, but I know they're definitely nothing like them.
I would rather refer to them as girasoles. As the Italian name suggests, they are followers of the sun; related to sunflowers, they sport similar but smaller flowers.

Settings were f/5.6, 1.180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42, 11mm extension, low flash, foil & white reflectors. The tubers were arranged tightly, interlocking with each other as much as possible to avoid showing any background underneath.
Not a great photo, but I wanted to take a picture as a landmark of sorts in my gardening year; something important I'm starting off which will hopefully be well worth it come early winter.

056: A Juicy Orange

(...Yeah, that's right.)
f/11, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, same lens setup as yesterday. The camera pointed nearly all the way down onto the half orange; the flash was angled down and a foil hood highlighted the fresh, juicy areas nicely.
I found it important to use quite a tight directional light here, otherwise using white reflectors would flatten the image - lessening the bright highlighted spots and overall contrast. The only thing I wish I had got better was a more even distribution of light from top to bottom. The top area looks quite bright, but further down it becomes slightly dull in comparison. I could always fiddle with the brightness contour, but I didn't want to. I merely got rid of some dust spots.

This orange was a tasty one.

055: Sweet Wrappers

Such bright colours. This one was another straight from the camera, another first shot got just right.
Close scrutiny reveals a curious fact: The wrappers are not solid colour [as I imagined,] but printed with their particular colour tint, plus the white text. Actually, this detail is difficult to make out in the 1600-pixel version here, but the full 3872-pixel original definitely shows the printed pattern of colour.

Settings were f/5.6, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42, 19mm extension, low flash, white reflector. The chocolates were arranged in an eggbox, four in each of the six dips. A simple and effective setup. The background blobs are a bit hexagonal, but that's fine by me.

054: Capsicum Hues

To me, peppers are not only delicious to eat, but fascinating when cut open. I found this particular pepper of special interest because of its traffic-signal-like distribution of colour.
Settings were f/9, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42, 29mm extension, low flash firing to right with foil and white reflectors.
I took some at a different angle before, with much more seeds visible. These were very nice details, but I preferred this second view as the curves and plump inner skin textures seem much more pleasing.

053: Cabbage Contours

Purple then, grey now; simply for the emphasis on tone and texture. I hd to turn the contrast up a fair bit for the look I wanted.
I tried some shots of the cabbage's cut face straight on flat, but they seemed little better than if had put the cabbage on a scanner, albeit with slightly better lighting. I also tried a couple at an angle, this is the final one I tried.
Settings were f/5.6, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, my usual 50mm M42 lens, this time with a 10mm extension. The orientation was originally landscape, but I cropped it to 2:3 at 100% height, as I decided that I preferred it after I looked at the best photo on a large screen.

Cabbages are rather like clouds in how you can imagine fairly abstract resemblances to other recognisable objects.
I think I can see the shape of an ear in there.

052: Airborne Toy Crash

What in the name of Flash Gordon happened here?
If I had taken a much wider shot it would seem obvious that this toy car wreckage is situated in quite an out-of-the-way place; the tall shrub is on steeply sloping ground behind a metal fence, and really not near where I was when I took this photo.
It's wedged in the crutch of two lichen-encrusted branches (possibly hawthorn) and missing it's chassis and interior. I keep imagining that it's a full scale car that was dropped from an aircraft into a gigantic tree.
f/4, 1/1000 sec. ISO 200, SMC P-FA 50mm.

051: Dried Mace

f/11, 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42 with 29mm extension, low flash & silver reflector.
Myristica fragrans - in this case mace, which surrounds a nutmeg.
Obviously it dried out into this shape, but seen just so it resembles a billowing ragged cloth against a yellowish sky - or even underwater. It also makes me think of how squid and octopi look when they swim, or a jellyfish.

050: Third Snow Bench

f/2.8, 1/200 sec, ISO 200, SMC P-FA 50mm.
There's a lot to be said for that Rule of Thirds. It may be an old and very commonly used rule, but it can really have a strong effect in a composition. I cropped this photo slightly so the shapes conform more closely than I shot it to. I find that the image is somehow more harmonious and ordered than it already looked.
Whether it needed to be or not is always a relevant question, but I mostly took this image with the rule in mind, as it has a collection of strong lines. Of course, the rule of thirds can work just as well on subjects with no immediately discernable geometric patterns, such as wooded landscapes.
It's just a rough guide, really. It doesn't have to be enforced rigidly, but just keeping simple compositional rules in mind when behind the camera is always very useful for taking better shots.

Using a 50mm lens on the 50th photo was a coincedence, I just needed something fast outdoors. I did use my FA50 1.4 instead of my usual Cosinon 50 1.8; I wanted autofocus.

049: Glowing Filament

This grimy old light bulb was discovered in the attic when we moved into our current house, nestled among mortar dust and mineral wool.
What's interesting about the setup of this shot is that I connected the bulb to a home-made fader box (dimmer switches wired to sockets) and was able to adjust the bulb's intensity to fine-tune the outcome independently from the shutter speed.
I like the internal reflections on this shot. The image would be no better without them, and they add much interest. They also remind me that it's all encased in glass.

I used 29mm of extension rings to a 50mm M42 lens to get the right degree of magnification for accomodating the filaments comforatbly in the frame. Once I decided that I was going to use f/16 and ISO 100 (the least sensitive settings) for maximum depth of field and detail I took a test exposure with the camera's best guess of metering and faded the bulb's down quite low. The exposure I settled on was 1/10 sec with a slightly dimmer bulb than before, as I got the impresssion that keeping the filament dim would keep some of the finer detail and have less blown-out highlights.
I am not sure if I was right, but I will have to try a similar shot again sometime, and experiment with doing things differently.

048: Glass Blobs

f/11, 1/180 sec, ISO 200, 50mm M42, 11mm extension, low flash, overhead reflector.
Whatever these things are, I'm sure somebody has a name for them. As far as I'm concerned, they're glass blobs - purely decorative oddities. The green ones have a slightly metallic translucent finish while the pink ones have a much duller and thicker coating.

That white glow in the highlights is the white reflector I placed in front of the flash, angled down toward the pebble-blobs. The first shot clearly showed my hand in the reflections, so that was binned.

047: Pear Top

Pears - the juiciest pomes of all, in my opinion. If you like the "Conference" variety, then I recommend growing a tree. On a good year their taste can beat any shop-bought ones, as long as they're ripe enough.
The background here was a document sleeve from a filing cabinet, if that's what they're called; it has a lovely deep green that complements the lighter tone of the pear. It has a slightly mottled effect as well, in a way again like a portrait background. This is much like the onion photo I took in January, rather like a fruity re-working of a similar theme.
Settings were f/8, 1/180 sec, ISO 200, 50mm M42, 21mm extension, low flash, white reflector.

The end of the stalk looks like a prune.

046: Man of Mud

It's a small ornament made of mud, not dung; that had to be clarified now. Yes, such things indeed exist.
I reckoned my flash might have cast too broad a shine on the small object to give the tight-beam effect I fancied. So, like the photo of the wooden cat, my 1 watt LED bike light was chosen. After waving it around over the mud-man to find the most interesting angle, I taped the light to an anglepoise lamp to shine from the upper right.
The final effect is something like a mummy in a lit museum display. It's coarsely textured, contrasty and somewhat dead and nasty-looking. Also, seen this way, its form is fairly ambiguous; you might not recognise it as having a face the first time.

Exposure is f/4, 1/8 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42 & 19mm extensions. I applied some fine white balance adjustment afterwards, and a little [possibly unnecessary] sharpening.

This was taken very shortly before both the camera and cycle light battery ran out, one about a second before the other... Uncanny. It's like the mud-mummy's curse or something equally daft.

045: Cracked Bark

This is from part of a sawn section of tree trunk, on which the bark has experienced curious cracking patterns. This is only an example of the variety of serpentine, ring-like cracks; but this area pictured has only half its bark, and the trunk wood that shows through is quite beautifully patterned. The bark's dark patches are where it is damp.
The range of colours is fairly subtle, but the textures are quite contrasting. They would have been more pronounced in a brighter, more direct sunlight, but only if it had been at the right angle to catch the texture correctly for the shot. At least the diffused sunlight here made no noticeable shadows.
f/8, 1/50 sec, ISO 200. DA 18-55 at 40mm.

Apart from just a little sharpening, contrast and white balance tweaking, there was a fair bit of post-processing involved on this image; most notably on the lower third, which was very subtly shadowed. I applied a white gradient overlay to brighten it, just like dodging a large area while making a print. This evened out the tone of the whole image - I just prefer it flatter like that.

I think this is another of those planet-surface-like shots... Although maybe not as much planet surface as a satellite view of a dried-up lake.

044: Frilly Lettuce

This is so green. No colour adjustments of any kind, though; it's vert naturel.
f/9, 1/180 sec. ISO 200, 50mm M42, 51mm extension, low flash.

043: Nuts & Syrup

Caution: This image contains nuts; also plenty of sweet syrup and chocolate.
I tried a different lens today - an old Tamron SP 28-80 macro-zoom with adaptall mount. Using an M42 adaptall, I added 52mm of extension tubes (inc. PK adapter ring,) and the result is quite a versatile macro lens.
However, it's not without its drawbacks. First, the rubber hood is quite wide and shallow, making it harder to avoid flare. What's more, the lens has no "manual" stop-down selector; this is a bugger because if I wanted to shoot at any f/no. more than mide open I would have to tweak the mount somehow. I might try some other time, but today I just used it as it was and hoped the flash wasn't too fierce. The aperture range wide open is 3.5-4.2, so it's not so fast that I get a completely unstable result.
The in-focus areas are pretty sharp, actually. The light was quite blown out at the left side, but I managed to rescue it with some judicious slider-tweaking on the exposure control and shadows/highlights functions in Raw Therapee. It might have come out better if I had used the white card more carefully underneath, but I didn't want to get it too close that the image might get more cloudy - the lens is wide open, after all.

042: Ten Paintbrushes

f/11, ISO 200, 1/180 sec. 50mm M42, 21mm extensions.
A modest collection of various paintbrushes is depicted today. Some more worn than others, they are arranged here in two interlocking, comb-like rows.
I set them up by duct-taping each row loosely to a 10-CD jewel case box and bringing them together; then making some individual up-down adjustments to fit them all fairly neatly together.
The background is the black inside divider sheet from a large box of chocolates (see post 010 - now all finished..:3) which was set behind the CD boxes and angled downwards slightly as it is a little shiny.
The flash was mounted on top of the camera as usual, but sideways due to the portrait orientation. The tinfoil top-reflector helped to fire it from the left, and a white card (the inside of the chocolate box lid!) reflected it from the right side.

I ahve to say I quite like this one.

041: Cosmic 35

Oops. I didn't upload this one on its designated day, (i.e. yesterday.) I got a bit careless, it seems. First of a series of slip-ups this year, I am guessing. Even if I don't miss any other days for most of the year, I'm sure that Christmas will give me some trouble. But that's a future problem to be sorted out.
Honestly though, it was taken yesterday - the EXIF data proves it.

Pictured is a detail of the top film counter dial on a little Cosmic 35 (Smena 8) camera, mostly showing the film speed conversion chart. That metal knob is nearly 2mm wide. I presume Gost is an old Russian film speed standard.

I used the same greatly-extended macro setup as used in the last photo. The depth of field at f/1.8 is virtually paper-thin; and even at f/5.6, used here, it is clearly still unforgiving. Usual 1/180 sec. ISO 100 was used.
I presumed the flash white balance preset would work OK, (as it usually does,) But I found that the camera's JPEG looked too blue. Granted, the grey plastic on the camera body has an ever-so-slightly blue tint, but this seemed too much. I adjusted the colour temperature to what I think is more realistic.

040: Golden Embroidery

Shown here is a detail of a tightly-sewn patch of metallic embroidery on a cloth-bound address book. The cloth weave is visible in front, while larger brown glass beads can just be seen behind, heavily out of focus.
Close up like this, the brass-golden coils of embroidery remind me of caterpillars piling on top of each other on a leaf.

This one's quite a super-macro. I used at total of 82mm of extension rings with the usual 50mm M42 lens to get tons of magnification. The focus distance is so close that I had to use a rubber lens hood, so I could collapse the lower end of it against the book and still have some shade over the top.

When I look as closely as I can at the embroidery, I can only just make out the fine details. This photograph may not be a very good example of the difference, but it really shows the details up more clearly, albeit often with a more selective depth of field. I suppose this is what fascinates most people who like to shoot tiny details of things; being able to see the details that are not resolved by the naked eye in everyday situations.

039: Dried Flowers

Another example from the order of dried things from the windowsill, this one a good year or so older than the wheat ear.
These curious purplish flowerheads have retained much of their original shape and vibrancy. I don't know what they're called, but I find them quite impressive because of this simple ability. I wonder if they'll still be standing on the windowsill in a couple more years' time.

038: Beanie Bird

This is unusual...
A fluffy bird toy with a sparkly background! It looks quite like a shower of sparks, actually. If it were more yellow the photo might seem to have been taken in a steel mill. That's an even stranger prospect, something you might come across at pictureisunrelated.com.

I used the same lens and flash setup as I usually have been (as I'm lazy,) and placed a curved, crinkled sheet of kitchen foil behind the bird head.

037: Cardamoms

A little scene of cardamom pods that look like people in a crowd; Many of them seem to be looking upwards, in the way I see it.
The pods were well past their best. They were stuck to a sheet of glass with small blobs of blue plasticine, hence the avoidant high angle; I cropped the photo mostly to avoid some stray blue blobs at the lower sides that I didn't notice before. A piece of pale yellow paper ran under the glass and emerged upwards behind as a backdrop.

Settings are 1/180 sec, ISO 100, 50mm M42 with 20mm extension. I used the flash firing up and forward with a white refector above. I tried f/4 to start, but I settled on f/5.6 as it provided a more rounded exposure.
I also couldn't help adjusting the colours from the RAW file, as there is a very stylised and faintly strange feel to this scene. The added contrast also improves the texture of the pods.

036: Lemon & Cloves

This is an old pomander, several years old. No longer citrus-scented, it is now utterly mummified and smells of the pot pourri that it has been lying in. But the mostly-broken cloves that pepper its dusty surface are full of interesting detail and patterns, so they get a big close-up here.
I used my normal manual flash setup with 20mm extension, and at f/5.6 as this aperture usually gives a correct exposure. I used a close tent of white polystyrene boards, foil on top by the flash and a piece of white paper under the front of the pomander.
The paper was close at first and produced a lot of up-light that flattened the image somewhat, so I pulled it away a bit to let an accent of shadow back.

035: Coloured Wires

These is nothing more than a bundle of electronic wires from a box in the attic. However, they come in an tangled array of randomised colours which can be conducive to an interesting image.

034: Pear Tree Bud

I have a habit of going on about texture and magnification, but I can't help but be fascinated by the way things look close up. The transluscent, parchment-like quality of the bud's skin is hardly visible to the naked eye (at least mine,) but close up like this you can clearly see its bronzed skin-like texture and the occasional vein. The occasional wartyness of the bark is shown up as a collection of fine, swollen splits.
Apart from this, the main reason I took this photo was to depict the shape of the twig at the emergence of a bud. The branch crooks quite far sideways at every bud and presents itself as a series of zigzagged Y-shapes.
I also just noticed that every bud grows about 120 degrees around from its neighbour, creating a fascinating triangular helix pattern along the axis of the twig. I don't know how common this is, as I'm not a botanist; but it certainly occurs on pear trees.
Aperture f/5.6, all other settings as yesterday.

033: Turnip Textures

f/8, 1/180 sec. ISO 100, 50mm M42, 52mm extension, low power flash, white reflectors. Another one-off shot. A little sharpening and contrast added afterwards.

OK, it's a detail of a turnip. But forget about that for a moment and consider how it seems to resemble the surface of a boiling, swirling gas giant planet... Now there's imagination at work! In this way it reminds me of some of the space travel effects in Flash Gordon (You know, that one. The fantastically camp movie.) There'd be no turnips on Mongo, I'd bet.
In fact, I'd bet that a great deal of us have never eaten a turnip, in the same way very few have sampled kohl rabi. Apart from at this time of year, they're quite a rare occurence in your local grocery, and not many people have much to say or suggest about them. My advice is NEVER boil them, consider eating them raw in salads, and also try to find the yellow-orange ones. They have the best taste.

This image has reminded me that I have to be more careful controlling the lighting on very high magnification shots, as contrast can start to drop off quite dramatically if light bounces around too enthusiastically in front of the lens element. I used a decent hood, but the shadow areas look very washed out, and turning up the contrast too much affects the rest of the image badly.

032: Ear of Wheat

f/8, 1/180 sec. ISO 100. Same lens setup as yesterday, but with flash, grey foam backdrop and white reflectors at side and close underneath. A tiny bit more magenta to the white balance, a little sharpening and extra contrast finished it off.
This is the tip of one of a few ears of wheat that grew in the garden last year, and have been sitting in a vase on the windowsill since. The bird seed feeder situated above their growing site is their most likely origin. As that patch was fairly disorganised, I just let the grasses grow, and now their plump seed heads provide me with an interesting subject to photograph in detail. Close up you can see its delicate saw-edged tips that could snag on an animal's fur and break off some seed heads, distributing them. Although the only furry animal the right size to effectively reach the ear would be a dog or a very large cat, none of which I usually see around here. But a fox... I might see a few more wheat grasses this year, providing I don't pull them up as weeds first.
I should probably make up a bird table (or possibly a bowl below the feeders) to catch grains when the birds peck out several at a time to take one in the bill.