Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? It’s taken a lot of prep work so far, and initial experiments have proven that the concept is sound, but will it pay off? We won’t know until at least tonight, possibly later.
At least none of the prep work will be wasted if the experiment fails, since it can all be used elsewhere. And it hasn’t cost me anything, except reducing my stock of adhesives slightly; all other materials were already on hand.
The experiment itself will provide at least a couple of answers, even if it’s, “You only have one shot every hour,” or, “You’re going to need more sensitivity than this.” I’ve already ruled out one lens, and in fact dug out an old, failed lens because of a specific trait.
Am I going to tell you what this is? Of course not – that would ruin the surprise if it does work. If you think waiting for a subsequent post is frustrating or something, bear in mind I’ve been meaning to get to this for well over a year, and in fact an initial image has been sitting in the blog folder since, let’s see… damn, it’s dated April 12, 2020! So, longer than I thought. Most of that is, of course, simply saying to myself that I’ll tackle it later on when it’s slow, but a little time here and there was spent hashing out methods in my head. Last night I finally made a few tries, and you may see the video shortly.
But anyway, something’s coming, though I yet don’t know exactly what.
We open with a shot from 2005, of Looking Glass Falls in Brevard, in the top two of familiar waterfalls in North Carolina. But this one isn’t the ‘best’ that I got while there, because I certainly got a lot closer, and did longer exposures to make the water all blurred and cottony, and all that. Instead, this was to illustrate the public access areas, as well as showing what was produced by Fuji Provia slide film in those conditions – which is admittedly different from the following comparison shot. Normally I got much better color than this, so I don’t know if this was a bad batch, or older, or got a little too heated in my bag, or what, but it’s not impressive in any way. Though while we’re here, we’ll take a look at where the overlook is (the splash of blue helps you to realize how far down it goes,) because this was shot from the roadside; there’s no parking ‘lot’ for the area because there wasn’t the room or the topography for anything that size, but the road had been significantly widened to allow roadside parking well down from here, and it was often pretty close to capacity. You also can’t really tell from this shot, but access outside of the railed viewing area is easy, and getting down to water level (and even right underneath the falls) is trivial to accomplish, so perhaps a quarter of those visiting, myself included, got down for different perspectives.
Look down to the lower right, where a crisscross of small trees is silhouetted against brighter background: that’s a very large fallen trunk right there, extending well out over the shallow creek leading from the foot of the falls.
Now we go a little more recent.
This came from 2017, actually the day of the total solar eclipse, just not at all during the eclipse. We were traveling south to get into the path of totality, and since we were passing, we had to stop. Deep haze and a different time of day changed the lighting conditions, but you’ll note that there are four times as many people here now. No, wait, you won’t, because I purposefully got down well away from where they might intrude, and waited until the family playing on the rocks near the falls (about midframe) got out of view. The overlook is just a little outside of the frame to the left, and I’m shooting from the end of that fallen trunk that I mentioned above, still there twelve years later. Now chasing the fartsy thing, I closed down the aperture to ensure that I’d get a longer exposure, in this case 0.6 seconds – not terribly long, but easily enough to blur the very active water, while also not giving others too much time to get into the frame again.
This doesn’t really illustrate the difference in slide film and digital, because I’ve gotten much better results from Provia than this, nor the improvements that I’ve made over the years, because I had done better images than the first even on that same day. But what it does illustrate is the difference between a snapshot and a scenic landscape, one able to be made into a large print for your walls (like the meter-wide canvas right over my desk here at Walkabout Studios.) Slightly more effort to get a good perspective, a little selective framing, a little patience to allow people to get out of the frame, and just a wee bit of knowledge of how to make the water more interesting – that’s all. The viewer has no impression of the incessant chattering of tourists off to the left, interspersed with the squeals and cries of the kids, and no sight of the various people traipsing through the waters. It’s all a lie, is what I’m saying, but one of those good lies…
[It’s not all a lie, really: the smells that you might be imagining, the feel of the humidity and even the spray in the air, the tricky footing underneath – those were all present and accurate to the image. Just not the implied seclusion.]
Did a quick pass around the nearby pond today, more to get out while the weather was actually pleasant than to chase photo subjects because the light was far from ideal, but I wasn’t so pathetic that I failed to take the camera. So when the little buff female mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) cruised by, I snagged a few frames, including a lovely portrait.
Of all the various summer residents that the pond has had, I’m kind of glad this one chose to stick around, because I like her coloration.
There was also a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) that could be found, like usual, but spooky enough not to allow too close of an approach.
Earlier, The Girlfriend and I had spotted it sitting low in the water like a duck, which I’ve never seen before. I never thought they swam at all, and certainly don’t have the legs or feet for it, but I’ve also never seen them wading that deep, so I can’t say either way. It wasn’t far enough out into the water to preclude a deep wading session, but I’ve never determined actual depth in most areas of the pond either. By the time we got closer (losing sight among trees as we did so,) it had gotten back to typical shoreline behavior as seen above. I had only taken the Canon 100-300 L along this time, for a light kit, and it didn’t quite peg focus too tightly, so this is what we have.
Meanwhile, the evidence of the beaver activity continues to grow.
A couple weeks back i had determined there were at least two North American beavers (Castor canadensis) by spotting one and hearing the warning slap of another while checking out the pond at about 1 AM. And then the overnight temperatures became too cold to merit staking out locations, especially with my sinuses. Last night it had actually been warm enough, but I never thought to check and immersed myself in the previous post and podcast anyway; by the time I realized how warm it was, it was far too late to begin a session.
But this afternoon, what I did find was where the lodge was. Probably.
I’ve never found one of the mid-pond lodges like most people imagine, instead noticing (in this immediate region anyway) that beavers have always made their lodges alongside tree roots in the banks of ponds or streams. My friend, one of the residents around the pond, suspected that the beavers were using the little island, and finding this just about confirmed it. Those are all beaver-cut logs and branches, and were certainly not there a couple of weeks ago, nor are they underneath any noticeable cut trees; I suspect that the entrance is just at the base of the larger roots towards the right.
Given that the temperature tonight was holding at a lovely 18°c, I decided to give it a shot, and this time The Girlfriend came along, hoping to catch a glimpse. I had coached her a little on using the reflections of the residents’ lights on the water to watch for ripples, to point towards a silent beaver cruising past while keeping the headlamps off, and so we sat down in a likely location and waited. There were a few false alarms, and twice the rain started very halfheartedly and gave up, about like my efforts to learn touch-typing. Then The Girlfriend directed my attention to some tiny, sporadic reflections on the opposite shore, ones that really shouldn’t have been there, and we became pretty sure the beavers were up on the bank there. I fired off a few test shots at extreme range, a measured 80 meters from our location (Google Earth is handy,) and got what was likely some eye reflections. Then we started circling the pond to get closer.
We were still about 20 meters from where we’d seen the reflections when the faint shadows of ripples crossing the reflection of the sky could be seen, and I used that for focusing and fired off a couple of frames, with the Vivitar 285HV flash at full power, the Tamron 150-600 at 400mm, and ISO set for 6400 – not ideal, but I was trying to make the most out of the light output. It worked well enough.
That’s the head to the left, with the ruby reflection from one eye, and the body stretches just past mid-frame; obviously we caught someone taking food back to the lodge. Beavers use the larger limbs for building and damming material, often stripping off the tasty bark, and the smaller branches serve as food. Later on, as the new saplings appear and the pond plants start sprouting, they’ll switch to those because they’re more palatable, but beavers are strictly herbivorous; anyone that says they should be removed because of damage to the fish populations is talking out of their ass.
We kept advancing towards where The Girlfriend had spotted the reflections, going slowly because we didn’t know how many there might have been, but afraid that we’d already spooked away the only one. The spot was empty, though we found the newly-cut limb right alongside some wet spots on the trunk, so we knew right where it had been. But then, just before giving up to head home, we saw the ripples again, and they were close.
The bulk of the flash unit atop the camera makes it really hard to use a headlamp as an aiming and focusing guide at night, and I eventually tore it off and handed it to The Girlfriend so she could do the spotlighting, but it was more than enough to peg focus and framing. What it didn’t reveal, however, were the numerous small twigs that sat between me and the beaver, not illuminated by the headlamp. The flash got them, though.
I chimped at the frame, cursed, and shifted position before the beaver decided to dive. Full credit to this one, and to the species in general: out in open water, they often don’t feel threatened and will let their curiosity get the better of them. This one actually turned around after passing and paused, fully illuminated by the strong beam of the headlamp, and I fired off another frame, this time free of those damn twigs.
Granted, this was only 8-10 meters distant now, and the flash can cover that distance. I’d love not to have to use ISO 6400, but we may just have to see what happens later on.
This is not quite full-frame, by the way, cropped only horizontally – the original was a little wider than this. But right now, I’m good with it – it’s probably the best detail that I’ve gotten out of any beaver pics. So far, anyway – I’m aiming for better, especially if I can get one on shore, and an ‘action’ shot would be ideal. They are, occasionally, still out at first light, so perhaps I’ll try again some morning. The temperature is forecast to plummet again, but I don’t think these two (?) are going anywhere soon, and some young may be popping up come spring. We’ll just have to see what happens.
[As a throwback to the early days, I did this one as a podcast too, so you can hear the audio of it immediately below. But if sounds like a long-overdue brake job bother you, you can simply read the text version.]
Walkabout podcast – But How? part 30: Responsibility
This is one that I’ve touched on here and there before, but I was reminded of it while watching Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go Of god (they capitalize it differently, those sillies.) As a small aside, I can certainly recommend the video, and seeing her realizations develop over time is captivating, but I don’t feel compelled to comment upon it too much; like Richard Dawkins’ The god Delusion, I’m in total agreement, so much so that there are no insights therein that I want to highlight, because the path to godlessness is surprisingly consistent – things just don’t make sense any other way, and the evidence for creation and/or supernaturality is totally lacking. We have religion only through cultural pressure, and not because it works in any way.
So, instead of answering any questions here, I point out something that is never recognized by the religious, never examined or considered, which is personal responsibility. Sweeney was struck by it when first considering that perhaps there was no god, and realizing that, for instance, all of the people wrongfully imprisoned or suffering from circumstance, those that prayed desperately for deliverance or help, actually had no one looking out for them at all. Initially, this is a depressing and dire thought, especially when considered against an alternative that a god is capable of changing this somehow, and the very idea is so anathema to the religious that they, at the very least, often credit atheism as being distasteful and cruel. Taking away hope like that!
Which, naturally, has no impact on the facts regardless. How we feel about something is the last thing we should resort to in deciding if it’s true or not, and just about everyone knows someone who should have learned that lesson a long time ago, often about relationships or major purchases. More to the point, the ‘hopeless’ perspective only comes about because we, as a species, spend so much time fostering the idea that there is a magic sky daddy that can come to the rescue (change details as necessary.) The problem is not that anyone has taken away hope – the problem is that we’ve insisted that there is someone or something magical that can jump in when needed.
It’s easy to imagine that, in circumstances where ‘hope is all someone has,’ that denying this is being cruel; let them have a bit of fantasy, a vestige of optimism, and so on. And there is admittedly some merit to not introducing further elements of depression or despair to someone that is already having a tough time. Such situations tend to be few and far between, however, and even doctors are straightforward when the prognosis is not good, because they’ve found that solid information, no matter how unwanted, is much better than facile fiction. People may insist that they don’t want to know when they’re going to die, but the foreknowledge of such also gives them time to do the things that they want, or feel obligated to: taking final trips, getting affairs in order, reconciling with loved ones, and so on. Moreover, living one’s life in full recognition of how things are is not just easier, it means that we’re able to face adversity much better. We do not view misfortune as judgment or failure or even abandonment, we do not cling to desperation that a ‘loving god’ won’t really let this happen (or try to invent rationales over why it does,) we simply accept it as circumstance – we may not like such circumstance, but we don’t resent it as if it was a conscious decision of someone else. Perspective does count for a lot when it comes to mental outlook.
One of the common denominators among the new atheists is the recognition of how much they were told, were assured, were impressed with from religious sources, that turned out to be nonsense, often outright lies. People really resent misinformation, and this too may come on top of whatever adversity they were undergoing. In many cases, it’s actually condescending, because what it subconsciously says is that I may know what’s real, but you can’t handle it. While it can be argued that most religious people really believe in the power of prayer and so on, ask them how often such prayers are answered, how often they really work. Watching all the hedging and dodging is quite fun, but revealing in itself; no matter how often someone might urge prayer as a useful action, they know it’s hardly dependable.
Further along those lines is what affect this reliance on spiritual intervention has on those that believe it. It has often been pointed out (from reputable sources, i.e., actual scientific studies) that religion flourishes in the more impoverished and stricken regions of the country or the world, and we’ll leave the chicken-or-egg arguments for someone else. Again, there’s this hope aspect, but there’s also the aspect that someone else is taking care of things, and even that this is the way things are meant to be. That leads to nothing but complacency, and a completely guilt-free sense of it as well. Some may resort to the argument that prayer and/or waiting on godly influence is harmless, but this is true only if there are no other options. To settle on prayer instead of, for instance, donating money, time, or materiel, or fostering legislation, or really, any other beneficial actions at all, is not just incredibly self-absorbed, it’s this placebo taken in abject dismissal of positive action. Donating just one dime, ten lousy cents, to any cause beats prayer every time, because there is never any time when those ten cents doesn’t work, never an excuse that it has no value due to ‘god’s plan,’ never an attempt to explain away the utter lack of improvement. The effect is magnified exactly as much as the amount of money/time/attention is, as well. Every time.
[People will also argue that they’re giving to good deeds through their church, which is the major selling point behind soliciting donations/tithes/etc, and this may be true – to a degree. Nearly every church that I see is in pretty damn good shape, however, and in many cases, the staff attached to them are amazingly well off – funny, they don’t seem to believe that god provides. But okay, I’m sure the middleman serves a purpose, so I’m happy to help out in the same manner, and you can donate to me instead, because I have no overhead in the form of meeting places and landscaping and all that. I’ll see that the money goes to a good place. If the thought of that makes you suspicious, good – you get it. Now apply that same critical thinking without bias, or lame excuses.]
I’ve pointed out, too, that the idea of a supernatural overseer can potentially have dire consequences when it comes to responsibility for the bigger things, like taking care of our planet. President Reagan made it clear, multiple times, that he believed in Armageddon, and his environmental policies reflected that in spades; why bother trying to protect something that will be destroyed in a few years anyway? He’s gone now, but we’re still here, well beyond the time that he (and every self-proclaimed prophet) thought that we’d be done, and we – and our descendants – have to live with the wanton disregard towards sustainable resources and, really, cleaning up our own messes. Which is something that I was taught to do at an early age, but I can’t vouch for how ineffective any else’s parents might have been. Considering the opposing position for the sake of argument, I still would have thought that any god might bear some judgment on how well we’re able to take care of ourselves, and show consideration for others, and bear that same responsibility that my parents, at least, tried to instill, rather than sitting back and believing that it’s all under control, so why bother? It’s a bit like Pascal’s Wager, only if Pascal wasn’t aiming to justify pre-existing beliefs. If we take personal responsibility, assuming that we’re the sole proprietors of our lives and nothing will happen if we don’t make it happen, and there really is no god, then we’ve covered our asses and done everything that we could. And if there is a god, can we imagine that it would look unfavorably on such actions? Does anyone out there really believe in a god that would encourage complacency and selfishness? I certainly haven’t found a religion yet that espouses this, but too often you cannot tell this from the practitioners…
There’s also this very subtle aspect, that once we receive the (self-appointed) label of ‘good,’ then we’ve fulfilled our natural obligation and have no need to establish further ‘proof’ or maintain such a thing – there are, of course, no requirements or tests to becoming religious in the first place, so it’s an instant, effortless boost in status. But people cannot be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – we’re all a mix of emotions and motivations and justifications, and such labels are a judgment call anyway, a matter of perspective. Actions, however, can be beneficial or detrimental; moreover, they tend not to lead towards a ‘once-and-done’ method of establishing status. Most people would be (rightfully) embarrassed by admitting that they performed this one good action five years ago…
I don’t think most religious people have consciously decided to be this way, and imagine most believe that they’re doing good in their own ways; it’s just the subconscious idea that some being can make things right (because, as we’re so often told, this being is nothing but good,) that fosters an idea that we all have backup. That’s part of what I do here: bring the subconscious, or assumed, or never-quite-logically-considered items out in the open to be examined. If we are to believe that there’s a supernatural entity that can correct our flaws or protect us from terrible events, we should be asking where it was during the Holocaust, the crusades, the countless purges (some of them perpetrated by, as we are so often reminded, those godless regimes,) the three centuries of witch hunts, the slave trade, the plagues, and so on and so forth – really, if you want a complete list it’ll take me a couple of days. And I think it’s safe to say that everyone involved did not somehow forget ‘the power of prayer.’ But then, we think that suddenly, notice will be taken when we get COVID, or some such triviality? How many ways can someone handwave away all the counter-evidence before they admit that we’re really on our own, and what we have is only what we make of it?
Further, when we see desperate situations in the world, they were never ‘meant to be,’ they are not ‘deserved,’ and no supernatural beings are going to set things right – we can’t distance ourselves with the idea that it’s not our responsibility, because it surer than hell isn’t anyone else’s.
Along these same lines, I’ll also suggest the post Bigger stakes than that, which highlights the oft-ignored aspect of consequence.
We’re going to go a little backwards on this one. We start off with a time exposure from August 17th, 1989, and despite it being on a negative with no date stamp, I can be this precise because it was taken following a total lunar eclipse, and I already knew the year and season. If I was really slick, I could give you a decent time too, because I know the precise location and the shadows from the moon will indicate where the moon was in the sky. I’m going to wing it, though, and say about 2 AM. The lights are from at least one big rig, but I think it was two, passing through the frame as the shutter was locked open, and despite the slight clutter from the other elements, the framing couldn’t have been much better.
But this image, an idle experiment while finishing off the roll, illustrated not only how cool time exposures could be, but how much light the full moon actually throws down, and that it’s not ‘blue’ as we imagine it. The original print received from the lab had been lightened more than this and appeared to be full daylight, but on examining the negative and ‘default’ exposures, I determined that it wasn’t quite that bright, and this is closer to the mark. It’s also the very first print that I had enlarged for display, and come the digital age, I made sure that it was scanned meticulously (actually, multiple times,) and archived – I’m not losing this one.
All this was with a borrowed SLR camera in the very early days of my photography – what I possessed then was my Wittnauer Challenger, a rangefinder with a fixed 50mm lens. But it was the start of a faint obsession with long exposures, moonlight, and light trails. So how has this progressed? Let’s take a look at perhaps my best version since then.
Nicely surreal, but honestly, no match for the first – I’ve never even done something comparable, much less exceeded that accidental effort so long ago. I admittedly don’t try too often, because the conditions have to be right, and I know that happenstance and luck contributed a lot to the initial image up there. This time around it was March 2000, on the edge of I-295 outside Jacksonville, Florida, the return leg of a trip through the state dedicated to photography. I saw the full moon glowing orange low over the highway and quickly pulled to the side of the road, set up the tripod, and waited for another truck. The very odd set of bars in mid-frame comes from a string of lights attached to the back of the cab, visible only briefly before the advancing trailer blocked the view again, while the uppermost lights came from the back of the trailer, indicating that I closed the shutter before the truck had gotten too far down the road. The moon was of course too low to illuminate the landscape (not to mention facing directly into it,) but this time I used it as an element instead, and the exposure was notably shorter; I can’t even go on memory for either, but from what I know about exposure now, I’d say the latter one was no more than ten seconds while the former definitely exceeded thirty, possibly a full minute or so.
I would have expected to have surpassed the quality of the first sometime well before 32 years had passed, but it’s never happened yet, and I have indeed tried several times. Really, getting a good location is a little more challenging than you might imagine, and the right vehicles in the frame count for a lot. But it also serves as a reminder that, in unknown locations throughout my stock, I probably have the best photos that I’m ever going to get of any particular subject. That’s not a good way to look at things really, and I’m always aiming to improve, well, everything. When (if) I beat that image up top, you’ll definitely see it here.
Not among different races or cultures of people, of course – that’s just stupid, a sign of hopeless immaturity, actually. But among certain substances, it can be quite useful. Like among oil and water.
That’s what we’re looking at here of course, small droplets of vegetable oil in a shallow glass pan of water. That’s because today (the fifth Monday in January) is Household Ingredients Day, when photographers are obligated to screw around with whatever’s handy to create something fartsy. Or at least try. Fart is in the eye of the beholder, naturally, and all I can do is show you want I got. Then when you’re done giggling, you can look at the images here and judge them for yourself, but of course you’re going to decide favorably, because I already know you have excellent taste.
This is also a bit of a callback to the second monthly abstract, before this was actually a thing, because I’ve been wanting to play around with such things a little more, and the lack of a January abstract (and the holiday of course) was a decent excuse. Initially, I experimented with soap bubbles, and got some promising concepts but nothing that was particularly strong, so I cleaned that out of the pan and went with the oil and water.
I also played around with having different images displayed on a tablet underneath the pan, but these were too close to produce a good effect – the distance should be more than a centimeter or so, to allow the oil drops to act as lenses. So what we have here is actually a CD, illuminated by a strong flashlight at an angle to get some of the rainbow diffraction to show up. The spheres are overlapping a bit because some of them are probably air, since I vigorously stirred up the water to make the droplets as small as possible. I have a Manfrotto 3021BPro tripod, which allows the center column to be removed and mounted sideways, so the camera could be positioned directly over my work surface, in this case the black glass of the range top. Initially, I was using the Sigma 28-105, but the working distance was right on the fine edge and the zoom was creeping from the camera facing almost straight down, so I switched to the Mamiya 80mm Macro with extension tube. Most of these are shot at f4 because depth isn’t really necessary for this.
The angle of the flashlight was crucial for the various effects, and being close to aiming directly down from alongside the camera seemed to give better diffraction from the CD and sharper contrast, though for a couple of these images I boosted that slightly, because GIMP is a household ingredient too.
I recommend letting the pan sit undisturbed for a while, to eliminate the residual motion of the water and let the smaller air bubbles combine and surface, but don’t hesitate to experiment with the motion if you like, as well as shifted focus and perhaps even other substances, especially with color; oil in a very shallow layer of red wine, perhaps. Go nuts. My next attempt may be water or glycerin drops atop a glass sheet suspended much higher above… I dunno, something colorful and dynamic, perhaps a print, perhaps a collection of marbles, who knows?
[I’ve never tried the stuff yet, but glycerin is supposed to bead better and not evaporate, and is often used as ‘sweat’ or ‘dew in photography and videography, so give it a try if you like. But this time, only if you have it handy already, because the holiday doesn’t allow purchasing extra props or materials.]
The funny thing is, these are very two-dimensional, flat images since the droplets are all at the water surface, but the differing sizes and contrast kind of disguises that in some of the images, doesn’t it? As yet, I haven’t figured out a way to make it more three-dimensional easily, save for using spider webs like here, and that required one of those spiders that spin haphazard, messy webs – not something that I’m likely to find right now.
Anyway, experiment away today, because it’s required by law if you own a camera and I’d hate for you to do jail time, but I’m also a snitch and I’m not covering for your ass. I mean, we both know you’re not gonna top these, yet it’s only mandated that you try, and it’s a good learning experience anyway. Have fun!
That’s right, it’s the last day of January, and so we have our time-honored tradition here on Walkabout of seeing out the month with an abstract. What kind of abstract do you have for us, January?
Well, we got… bubbles… or something. Water drops, maybe. A drastic overuse of some Photoshop filter. Contrast and circles, anyway. Can’t get a whole lot more abstract than this, really.
Moreover, this was shot within the past hour or so specifically because I had very little that even fit from the past month, and nothing at all that I liked, so I set out to make something. And for once, I got plenty of good candidates. Along with plenty of crap too, but you didn’t hear that from me and you won’t be seeing it. Unless you consider this crap, in which case I don’t care what you think.
Since today is also a holiday, I will return and give a bit more insight into this, but right now I’m less than half an hour from the typical abstract deadline, it already being the 31st, so I gotta finish this off. And don’t try looking at the tags or the image info because they won’t help at all. If you knew, it wouldn’t be abstract now, would it?
I mention using this lens from time to time, and I’ve gone into detail here and there, but it deserves another look, especially as we come up on its 25th birthday, more or less.
When I bought my first ‘serious,’ new camera, the Canon Elan IIe, back in 1997, I picked a pair of lenses to go along with it, using my income tax refund for the previous year. The primary lens was the Sigma 28-105 f2.8-4 – a better zoom range than most were offering at the time, and the fastest too. While definitely not the sharpest lens available, it was versatile, and served as my workhorse until 2004 in Florida, when the aperture stopped working. Much later, I discovered that this was due to a ribbon cable within that carried the signals back and forth to the electronic aperture within the floating elements. But back in 2004, I set the lens aside with the thought that maybe I’d see about repairing it later on, this not being affordable at the time.
[A brief aside about zoom lenses: Because of their variable focal length, there are usually groups of lens elements inside that move independently when zooming, and these are where the aperture must sit, so a flexible cable to an electronic aperture control is used instead of any mechanical method. But over time, these cables often fail, for some lenses much faster than others.]
And then, probably about ten years ago, I started experimenting again with the various ways that extreme macro magnifications could be achieved without specialty lenses, among these being lens stacking and lens reversing. Lens stacking is putting a shorter focal length (often 50mm) reversed onto the end of a longer focal length like a short to medium telephoto. This varies a lot in effect, often introducing diffractive distortion, but sometimes working remarkably well. Lens reversing is simpler, and just means using a lens (usually a wider angle like 35mm) backwards directly on the camera body. Both of these, by the way, can be accomplished easily with inexpensive adapter rings. I tried out the Sigma 28-105 on a whim, just holding it against the mounting ring on the camera for initial tests, and found that it worked pretty well, so I went ahead and got the proper adapter for it.
[Side note II: This works with wider-angle lenses because of the light path. Normally they capture a wide view angle and focus it down to the width of the film/sensor plane only a few centimeters from the back of the lens. Reversed and used backwards, they can take something a few centimeters from the (now front) of the lens and ensure that the image covers the whole sensor plane, but to get it into focus, the subject tends to be very close and significantly magnified. You will never get something even a meter away to focus at all.]
This was working okay, but of course the aperture was fixed wide open, far from ideal with any macro work. The more the image is magnified, the shorter the depth of field gets, and with the magnification of the Sigma, tight focus was down to less than 1mm at f2.8. So I opened the lens up, worked my way down to the aperture motor and removed it, which meant the aperture could now be adjusted by nudging a little gear down there. There was no way to keep doing this with the lens reassembled, so I closed it down significantly, but not quite all the way, and reassembled the lens – correctly I might add. Later, with multiple exposure tests, I determined that I’d gotten within a half stop of f16. This made depth of field acceptable for the subjects that I was tackling. But, since it was fixed, it did make the viewfinder image dark, requiring plenty of light on the subject just to know when it was in focus.
Used this way, the focus ring does almost nothing – trivial tweak in distance and that’s it. So the zoom ring becomes the rough focus and/or adjustment to working distance, and most often, I either decided that I’m after maximum magnification (which would be at 28mm,) or I’m after a certain framing, so I zoom until I can snag it. Then, I simply lean back and forth with the camera itself until focus is achieved.
This does, of course, introduce its own issues. Focus range is still exceptionally short, within millimeters, so holding that still within that narrow a range is challenging. Actually, I can’t do it at all myself, unless I brace against something. On those occasions when I’m trying for high magnification but can’t find anything to lean against or even get a finger to touch, it’s down to timing, trying to trip the shutter just as my swaying/breathing (which really does affect the focus) closes in on optimum sharpness. This obviously doesn’t always work, so I often take several frames in the attempt. This still doesn’t always work. But it does often enough to get something slick.
Having been inspired by seeing the results that someone else achieved, I also did some work on the Vivitar macro bellows.
The basic premise is, move a lens further from the sensor plane to enlarge the image more, i.e., provide more magnification, just like moving a projector further from the screen. To this end, they make extension tubes for all major camera brands, but less frequently seen is a bellows, which is just a widely adjustable extension. This one had been made years ago (long before the Sigma lens) for use with Pentax screw-mount/M42 lenses, but it came with a Nikon adapter on both ends. I kept the front adapter but purchased a Canon adapter for the rear, then tried it with several lenses. It’s often recommended to use decent enlarging lenses, sometimes reversed, because they’re optimized for the extension and corrected for both flat plane and chromatic aberration. I simply took a few Nikon body caps, which are basically the same as the lens base, drilled them out and altered them to serve as adapters for various lenses; in this case I was trying out a few enlarging lenses I’d obtained. Long story short: the performance was nearly identical to the reversed Sigma 28-105, and while the bellows could produce a little greater magnification, I could match or exceed that with extension tubes on the Sigma. And, as can be imagined, the Sigma is easier to wield.
Let’s see some quick examples, first of the magnifications. This is the Sigma at 105mm, essentially the farthest it can be used from a subject and thus the widest angle.
Not especially close, but again, this is the maximum range – ‘infinity’ is not an option. And you can definitely see some chromatic aberration, some color fringing, in the corners, but they’re also out of focus. Now we’ll go to the other end of the scale – both of these images are full-frame by the way, not cropped at all.
Mind you, this is straight up, no extensions or added diopters or anything – so you know, the entire date is 3.7mm in width. Out of curiosity, I finally sat down and calculated the magnification that this achieves, which is 2.4X – less than I’d thought, but not at all shabby at that, and much higher than any standard macro lens on the market.
Now we’ll look at the results from an El Nikkor 50mm f2.8 enlarging lens at f16, on the bellows extended to about 125mm.
Pretty close to the same thing, though the bellows can extend a little farther for more magnification, but then again, the Sigma can be used on extension tubes and likely exceed the maximum of the bellows. At this point, it comes down to how much diffraction and aberration takes over.
I find it interesting that the lens is now having a longer life at a purpose it was never intended for, with probably much sharper results, than its original and designed use – which really wasn’t bad at that. It had been through multiple trips to Florida and the NC beaches, shooting dozens of weddings and thousands of nature slides, then sat around in a box for several years until I discovered its new purpose. I’m not going to recommend never throwing things out on the idea that maybe someday they’ll have a use, but it worked out well for this one. And it got me this portrait, which cannot be denied.
I was out on the road a little too far from home (where my camera, long lens, and tripod sat) when I spotted the moon rising above the trees – blood red, dim, and of course looking huge. First off, if you know what time the moon rose this morning you may be wondering why I was on the road at that time, but bug off. Anyway, I liked the color but knew it would be unlikely to still be that color by the time I got back, which would only be about twenty minutes, but that’s how it goes. I still figured I’d make the attempt anyway.
The real trouble was, there are a few too many trees around Walkabout Estates, so the effective horizon is higher than it was while seeing the moon out on the road, and I still had to wait another ten minutes before it became fully visible. I did a quick check, and Stellarium plots it at about 7°, though I suspect it’s a little higher than that, but I have no accurate way of determining this yet. One day. Anyway, it was certainly brighter orange by this time, though my exposure makes it seem a little darker than it appeared in person.
Focus could have been a wee bit better, but I wasn’t aiming for fine detail as much this time, especially when the shutter speed was 0.4 seconds, so tripod shake, atmospheric ripple, and even rotation might fudge it a little. The big crater on the terminator, almost dropping into shadow over there to the right, is Clavius, by the way, and we’re 23 years late for having a base there…
Is it my imagination, or does the moon look slightly distorted here, squashed a little? I would have thought it was high enough to overcome the atmospheric distortion that can occur on the horizon.
[Actually, it is my imagination – I just went into GIMP with the circle tool and it matches perfectly. It may only be a factor of both the less-than-half terminator line and my particular crop, slightly favoring the unlit portion that I know is there. Or the brighter lunar highlands at the bottom disguise the curve. Or my glasses might need work. Or I’m old. But while I’m on the subject, the idea of the moon looking huge on the horizon has been kicked around countless times, with multiple potential explanations, but to clarify, it’s just an illusion – the moon is the same size at rise or set than it is overhead, and my various photos at the same magnification maintain this. Partially, it’s thought to be that, in relation to the other things we see near it as it rises, it seems to overwhelm them, especially when we can see things getting smaller with distance – it’s kinda psychological. There’s also the concept that we envision the sky not as a sphere, much less an empty space, but as a flattened bowl, much closer to us overhead than it is out at the edges where the horizon is, so we perceive that the moon is much farther away when low and should be even smaller. We’re weird.]
The session wasn’t slated to last long, however – I could see the cloud cover moving in and it soon started overtaking the moon. When I’d first gone out once I got home and started looking, I thought the clouds might already be obscuring it, but then it appeared over the trees. It remained that way for only fifteen minutes or so before vanishing, which wrapped my session, but hey, a little winter content, and it wasn’t all that cold out there anyway. I really should be over chasing the beavers*, but I’m not psyched for a multi-hour session at the pond, so it’ll wait until later. I know, I know, “Big fat professional nature photographer,” yeah yeah, but if I was getting paid for the pursuit it might be a different matter. Everything has a price – we can deal.
The date of the above shot is unknown; it’s a slide, and I know where it was shot but not when. For some reason this slide has no date stamp, though others, from what I believe was the same trip, do, so I’m going with that: August 2006. Down by a boathouse on Hyco Lake in northern NC, these guys were everywhere, and I took the opportunity to lean in and do a portrait with the Sigma 105mm macro lens, and I’m fairly certain at that time that I had a custom-made macro reflector for the Canon 380EX flash unit, which would normally be pointing over top of such a close subject. This is a long-jawed orb weaver (genus Tetragnatha,) by the way, and I was pleased at the spider facial detail that I captured.
Now we jump forward seven years (or thereabouts) to 2013, seeing the same genus on a trip to Georgia.
This time, instead of slide film in the EOS 3, it was the original Digital Rebel. The Sigma macro had gone wonky and so this was either the Mamiya 80mm macro with extension, or the reversed Sigma 28-105 – I can’t remember which, and obviously neither one was leaving their spoor in the EXIF file. The image up top is full frame, the entire slide, while this is is cropped slightly – call it at least 85% of the full frame, enough that you’d have to look closely to be sure of the change (or at least I did – this image was uploaded back then and I’m just recycling it, but I did compare it to the original file.) The lighting is courtesy of my first decent macro softbox, the Sunpak FP38 with a custom diffuser seen here, which worked great until I inadvertently fried it a couple years later by hooking up an AC adapter set with the wrong voltage (stupid.)
You can see the difference in magnification of course (and the more I look at the latter, the more I’m convinced I’d used the reversed Sigma,) but the lighting deserves a lot of attention too, because it’s responsible for showing so much of the detail, and giving that nice sheen to the chitin without harsh spotlighting. The entire frame may span roughly 12mm or so, and the body width of the spider (not counting legs of course) might top 4mm, likely less. Notably, both were shot ‘in the wild,’ no attempt to restrain the subjects at all, and I was exceptionally lucky with the latter image because spiders tend to be a little shy and go for cover if someone leans in close, but in this case she (yes it’s a female) simply tucked into a line on a trunk and counted on her camouflage, and I managed not to spook her out of sight.
But most of the credit, at least for the advances between the two images, goes to the equipment. To some extent, I knew what I needed but hadn’t dropped the significant money on it, because macro work usually requires lights pointing in very specific locations down directly in front of the lens. To a greater extent, however, I ended up making or modifying what I needed because such things simply don’t exist (yet,) such as the softbox aiming downward at an angle, broad enough to ‘cover’ an entire macro subject so the light doesn’t look directional, but portable enough to carry mounted on the camera. Over the past ten years or so, lots more little fiddly bits like articulated arms became available on the webbertubes, and I could also find obscure variable-output strobes that weren’t ridiculously cumbersome.
And the amazing performance of a defunct mediocre lens, when used backwards, was just an extreme bit of luck that I’m exploiting shamelessly.
The session wasn’t slated to last long, however – I could see the cloud cover moving in and it soon started overtaking the moon. When I’d first gone out once I got home and started looking, I thought the clouds might already be obscuring it, but then it appeared over the trees. It remained that way for only fifteen minutes or so before vanishing, which wrapped my session, but hey, a little winter content, and it wasn’t all that cold out there anyway. I really should be over chasing the beavers*, but I’m not psyched for a multi-hour session at the pond, so it’ll wait until later. I know, I know, “Big fat professional nature photographer,” yeah yeah, but if I was getting paid for the pursuit it might be a different matter. Everything has a price – we can deal.
