Post your photography!!

[Danddd]

I glanced out the window last Saturday evening and saw this interesting sunset with the cool sky-scape over the roofs of the houses across the street. Grabbed the one camera handy, the D780 with a 105,2.8D micro lens attached and hoped to catch the moment.

 

[mhedges]

Open Mill side by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[mhedges]

Parallel Lines at Haw River Mill by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[Modlin]

 

[Danddd]

 

[devnull]

Here's the latest on my macro setup.

This is the Teledyne/FLIR camera I bought. I got it a few days ago, and the rest of the cabling, PoE injector to power it and the Nikon F to C mount adapter arrived in the meantime. I had to make cables, although I bought cables terminated at one end and wires on the other to reduce the amount of work involved.

I'm still using the MIOPS Slider+ at this point as the MJKZZ focusing rail won't be here for a few weeks at the earliest. Should be getting the order in within a few days. It will be coming from Germany.

I had to make a trigger cable for the MIOPS focusing rail to fire the camera. Now I get to make another alteration to the cable to allow the camera to trigger the flashes I'll be using. I get to add another 2.5mm TRS connector to go to the Godox CT-16 wireless trigger.

It took about a day to set everything up and do some testing to verify functionality. The software I'm using to manage the camera is complicated, and the configuration is not at all similar to a normal camera like we use. The camera is an industrial model, and I really have no idea as to what it is actually used for.

I used Google's Gemini AI chat bot to work through the process, and without it I would have spent at least 2 weeks getting to where I am now.

Here's the setup as I was working on it. It's set up on my optical workbench now. I needed to set the infinity focus before I added an objective.

And the final infinity focus image I generated. It is a color camera, not sure why it's in B&W. Just something else I need to adjust. It's about a half mile away.

 

[highping]

 

[onepixel]

It's been gray and rainy.
Processing old photos from a trip to Granada, Spain.

 

[mhedges]

Crusty Bathroom by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[mhedges]

Warehouse from the side door by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[Modlin]

 

[devnull]

I have two reasons why using the electronic shutter on lighting pictures is not a good idea, or rather on lightning with an A7R IVa. The A1 II probably would have been fine.

That was very disappointing to see.

Live and learn. At least on the second one I can crop and get most of it.

We had a serious thunderstorm come through a little while ago. Baseball size hail although I didn't see any that size where I live. Ping pong ball size is what I saw here.

With the lightning sensor on a sensitive setting I captured the sequence of the full storm in the images I took. The clouds in the storm were rotating like you'd see when a tornado is spawned. That was a nasty storm, and there are more on the way. Cloud height is high, some storms in the area were 60K feet.

 

[devnull]

Here's a bit of redemption. The sky to the northwest opened up and presented one of those opportunities that I hoped would pan out. And it did.

This is the jpeg that I cropped a bit.

 

[devnull]

I shot these somewhere around 5 AM this morning, not sure exactly when as I had the time wrong on the Sony A7 II I used. I actually had both my A7 II and the A7R IVa set up, but the A7R IVa was pointed toward the leading edge of the storm, and it faded just as I got set up. So the less capable camera got all the lightning.

A few of these are pretty big crops, about as far as I can push it given the sensor density of the A7 II.

The lightning was right on the edge of the cloud line, so quite often it was a narrow strip in the frame with the action. I tried a panoramic perspective on a few of them that were particularly wide.

I have a number of images from yesterday I haven't processed. While there were few great shots, over the last few days I've been pretty lucky.

 

[mhedges]

Mill from the east by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[Danddd]

 

[onepixel]

 

[mhedges]

Haw river mill room by Mark Hedges, on Flickr

 

[devnull]

I didn't have much hope for this shot when I was looking at it. Having a high density sensor really helped as this is a pretty big crop. Cleaned up pretty well. Not a great shot, but worth the effort. That strike was a long way off, and fog was rolling in with the storm.

These are some others that I didn't have much faith in but they turned out ok after working them over in post.

The one below is from the rolling shutter problem while shooting with electronic shutter. I cropped below the band across the image and was able to salvage something from it.

 

[devnull]

This is where I am with my macro photography. I'm still struggling with lighting and have determined that the big brutal Metz flashes are not the solution. They work as they should, but I have to use them on manual mode, and that means there's no adjustment in the power of the flash and automatic mode just won't work either. You get full power and that's it. I had to move my setup to one side of my optical benchtop and move the flash about two feet (~50 cm) away. And that's with me using a 50X objective that has an effective aperture of f60.

So I ordered a Godox MF12 Dental kit which includes a number of accessories that will be useful for macro photography, and also for shooting insects, bees and whatever else. There's a ring mount so I can mount both flashes on the front of a lens for that use case. It's similar a similar kit to the Bolt flashes I have, but much higher quality. I was going to try my Bolt flashes for some short stacks today, but there's no way to use an external trigger on the wireless transmitter they use so that's not an option.

Hopefully the Godox flashes provide a good solution. They should be here tomorrow.

This is probably the last attempt to use the Metz flashes. I could come up with some other solutions like taking clear plastic containers and painting the outside and inside with white paint to create a mini light box (and then point the Metz flashes at the sides), but I feel the Godox flashes are a better option. The Metz flashes also require a long recycle time - 12 seconds per image, and when you're shooting a stack that is 200-300 images, the chargers can't keep up with the power drain on the batteries. I have new lead-acid batteries, and surprisingly they do last long enough to get through one stack. Plus, the Metz flashes are huge, making them difficult to position.

This is a Monarch butterfly wing @ 50X.