Category: Macro Challenges

Another day, another macro challenge (Day 10!). Today I’ve been experimenting with patterns and textures, trying everything from the old wooden beams in our flat to our matt steel stair bannisters.

I finally honed in on fabrics and decided to take a closer look at some Harris Tweed. Now I am very allergic to wool / tweed type fabrics, so I thought it’d be really interesting to zoom in and see just what might be causing my skin irritations and itchy eyes…

It was immediately apparent – the amount of loose, sharp fibres on the tweed are easy to see with the camera. Even just looking at this shot makes me itch!

Day 9 of the macro challenge is here…

This, believe it or not, is a close up of our kitchen work surface. It’s a smooth marble surface, which contradicts the image taken here.

I love the seemingly different contours of the surface in this image – it’s undulations and peaks are in stark contrast to the surface I see everyday in my kitchen. Yet again my macro challenge has forced me to look at things differently.

Day 8 of the macro challenge, and this soaring heat has inspired me to consider taking a shot of something cool and refreshing.

Today’s shot is the head of a pint of Guinness. Bubbles of condensation have formed on the outside of the glass as the glass warms in the sunshine. I like the contrast of the black against the creamy white head of the Guinness and the shiny water droplets. I also like the honeycomb structure of the condensation where the foam of the head meets the cool but warming liquid.

I had tried this shot last week with more transparent liquid, but the contrast levels and detail were not sufficient. I’m much happier with this shot today.

 

It’s day 7 of the macro photography challenge and I’m embracing the emergent theme of trickery. The more I experiment with the macro lens, the more I uncover images of every day objects which remind me of much greater things.

Today it’s a clementine, with the majority of its skin removed for its zest. This has left a rough outer layer which, when photographed, reminds me of the surface of the moon or a beehive.

This is my chosen shot from day 6 of my macro challenge. I think my family thought I’d lost the plot when they saw me taking these shots at my Grandma’s 90th Birthday party!

I love this because it really does make the mind work overtime. To me, it looks like the shot of a heart / body cavity and something out of the movie ‘Inner Space’. It is, in fact, the inside of a red pepper! This is why I am learning to love macro photography – it allows you to see detail the eye misses – both myself and my Grandma’s will never look at a red pepper the same again now.

To take this shot I balanced the pepper carefully in a glass to wedge it still, and then positioned it in a source of strong natural light to illuminate the pepper from the outside in. It’s taken vertically – I am standing over the pepper, shooting directly into the bottom of it. I used ISO 2000, with a shutter speed of 1/50 sec at f/10.

I should also have highlighted on day 1 of the challenge, that I am using the Canon EOS 7D with the Canon EF100mm f/2.8 lens.