Potpourri
Photographer grasping for winter sanity.
What Is It?
I’ve been down. I haven’t taken a picture in weeks, possibly months. The holidays are unusually tough on me for multiple reasons. The bleak midwinter is cold and dead; I guess I could venture out to take pictures of death, but it’s too cold and I am old and not bold.
Anyway, I prodded myself to find something to shoot in my warm, dry postage-stamp “studio” set. I enjoy getting close. The above is about 1.5:1. I didn’t crop it — that’s the in-camera crop.
I’ll reveal what it is and how it was shot at the end.
Sorry, not a toilet brush unless you are doing a punishment tour in the latrine with a toothbrush (old soldiers know what that means).
My dentist recommends these G.U.M. brand Proxabrushes. They replace floss and are more efficient. I shot them at ~1.5:1 magnification with my “Big Mickey,” Meike 85mm f/2.8 Manual Focus Aspherical Medium Telephoto Full Frame Macro Lens. It’s a pain to use in the field (I prefer my fully-coupled Sigma 70mm f/2.8 Art DG Macro for Sony), but it’s my only 1.5:1 macro, making it ideal for itty-bitty stuff like these tiny brushes. I can take my time in controlled conditions, and the lens is superb.
The lighting setup here is dirt simple: a single Neewer LED array (but any light would work) aimed at the lens but barndoored off the black backdrop for max black. The makeup mirror is an old commercial studio trick to kick a bright highlight into the offside of the subject by simply reflecting the mainlight. I can use the concave side for a spotlit effect.
Andromeda Gail takes pictures!
This itsy-bitsy camera was my first digital in 2007. I retired it in 2008, but my wife continued to use it. Now it belongs to my grandaughter Andromeda Gail, Andi for short. She is seven-goin’-on-eight and a real pistol. Predictably, she is busily working on the Art of the Selfie, and like Grampa, she shoots anything that catches her inquisitive eye.
Full Disclosure: All of Andi’s photos herein have had a little (‘hem) work done by Grampa(parazzo) because, well, you know…
Andi loves to take pitchers like Grampa, but I need to teach her to hug her elbows into her ribcage; I’m noticing a lot of camera movement. Here she’s shooting one of her pals with the überpoor ambient light. The camera missed focus, going for Andi’s reflection in the mirror instead of her stiffly-posing friend.
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I haven’t had a chance to ask her if she set this up to capture her reflection, but if she did, that is somethin’, ain’t it? Clever!
The original file is in the Topaz Labs Photo AI workspace. Long ago, this would have been it, mush with gravelly noise, nothing to be done.
After running the picture through Topaz Photo AI at defaults, the improvement is astounding. Look at the child’s eyes before and after. Whatever we may think of artificial intelligence (I just published a piece on it) as a tool, I think it is incredible.
Photo AI is Topaz Labs' latest and greatest application for turning sow’s ears into — not sow’s ears. I don’t work for Topaz, but I plug their AI products, plus Adobe Lightroom Classic (CC) and Photoshop 2023. I’m not yet as skilled as I’d like, but I’m working on it. I am of the school that no picture is completed Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC).
When Mommy and Daddy married in 2011, Erin thought folding a thousand origami cranes was a swell idea. She ended up folding most of them. They were strung on monofilament, and we still have many strings hanging decoratively around the house. Andi made this crane abstract with her Nikon Coolpix L12.
So, What It Is?
EasyLiner Select Grip 12 in. x 20 ft. Shelf Liner, Gray — Sold by Walmart. I only needed a few inches, but twenty feet is how it’s sold. The rest of the roll has been gathering dust, but whenever I noticed it, I said, HMmmmmm…
Here’s the setup, with the same basic backlighting as the little Proxabrushes with Big Mickey focused 1.5:1, f/8.0, I think; the Meike does not couple to Sony’s electronics, so it records no metadata, but neither did my 4x5-inch view camera. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So there’s my current potpourri of faux creativity! Keeps me off the streets and out of the bars.
📸As always, thanks for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! 😊👍
