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Microscopic Abstraction By Alden

BTS

The concept of photography is a little weird. Photons hitting a camera are captured in either a sensor or film, and then those captured photons are used for our entertainment, education, and amusement. One of the neat things that photography can bring is the ability to see what our eyes alone can't. In this presentation, I will bring the small world to you.

This is the messy setup I used to bring you the following photographs. I used a flash with a snoot and my camera had a total of 65mms of extension tubes. An extension tube increases the distance between the sensor and the lens resulting in a shorter minimum focus distance. In this case, the distances between the lens and the subject were often under 5 millimeters.

Later, I put my camera on a tripod and used a remote trigger.

Photo "studio" and camera setup

GOAL:

Shoot something cool on mirrors

First steps

At the start of this project, I was shooting a car on top of mirrors and water.

I took a photo of the water droplet; it spiraled from there.

The Product

Alcohol has some neat properties when it comes into contact with water. Water and alcohol repel each other, this can be seen when I colored the water green and used an alcohol-based ink.

I completely deviated from my original goal of shooting cars and their reflections. I chose to deviate because the results were a lot better than some cars on water.

When these Inks dry, they tend to leave stains on the mirrors that I was using.

These inks can create organic shapes on top of the mirrors.

The mirror brings what looks like another dimension to these photos.

Pushing the definition of depth and it's perception.

The skill I almost mastered is macro photography. The difficulty with macro photography is getting things in focus and properly exposed. I have lots of under-exposed photos, but toward the end of the shoot, I got most of my images exposed and in focus.

I believe that the most interesting part of this project is that you can have photos not be in complete focus, but still be a good viable aspect of the final results.

Some more photos

I am verry happy with the results.

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