Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

This winter has been mild here, but with one dark gloomy day after another. None were darker than the winter solstice, which was heavily overcast. I visited some remote coners in the Allegan forest, trod over fields where the berry vines seemed to reach up and snag my boots; and skittered around the edges of the most impenetrable corners of the forest. I sought something that did not want to be found, that bristled, threw up obstacles and pinched the trees together to make a barrier- "go away leave me alone."

 I brought a film camera and a couple of rolls of Tri-X, pushed to 1600 to compensate for the gloom...

Click on the image for a larger file.

Pentax Mz-S, FA 28-105 f4-5.6, Tri-X @ 1600, HC110 dil B.

A couple of weeks ago a group of us visited The Henry Ford for their  "Holiday Nights" festivities....

An 18th century holiday / wedding feast (click on the link for a larger file):

  Some mummers - see this past post for more info:

 

Last week I tried my hand at a high magnification photo of a stinkbug’s face. Today it’s the other end - a shot of the stinkbug’s wingtips:

(Click on the image for a larger file.)

Taken with a Pentax K01 and DFA 50mm macro on an additional 68mm of extension. The abdomen of the now thoroughly dessicated bug broke off, so there is a bit of translucent lighting here that makes the colors pop more than I expected.

I took a stroll through some of the back roads of the Allegan Forest today, enjoying the winter woods and some icy puddles…

(Click on the image for a larger file.)

A vehicle had gone down the two track sometime earlier in the morning and had broken the ice on some of the puddles - and thr broken ice on these “crunchy puddles” proved to be one of the most interesting subjects during the walk.

Oak leaves encased in ice:

An interesting fern ice pattern:

And lastly some pine needles in slushy mud:

Another experiment in extreme macro… After last week’s test with the stinkbug I’ve been looking for subject that will be interesting at 2x - 10x magnification. I stumbled into a dessicated shell of a crane fly resting on a window sill. The shot below was taken with a Pentax K01 and Otamat 20mm f1.7. The magnification is roughly 4.5x life sized. This is 48 stacked images (click on the photo for a larger file):

Here are some fairly high magnification photos of a stinkbug - the only insect that I have recently encountered here in December’s chill. These bugs have been something of a nuisance as last winter and again this year they try to get into the house in late autumn and one or two might appear at any time during the winter. In this case, when I saw it walking across the floor I put it in a jar and then into the freezer. An hour or so later had it pinned and ready for photographing.

Here is the first image, taken at about 2.5x life sized (be sure to click on it for a larger and uglier file):

Here is the second image, which is a more extreme magnification of ~10x:

These aren’t the best examples of this type of photography but the first one is passable. Here are a few technical notes about technique:

Both shots were made using a Pentax K-01 16 megapixel APS C camera. The K-01 was Pentax’s somewhat quirky mirrorless body. I chose it because its focus peaking is excellent, having no mirror means no mirror shake and the sensor in this camera (made by Sony) is one of the best APS-C sensors out there.

One problem I experienced with both images was a loss of sharpness due to the shake of the camera’s shutter. This simple solution to this was to light the photos using flash and crank the shutter all the way up to 1/4000th (the fastest that the K01 can do.) A single flash with a few pieces of white matboard as reflectors did the trick.

The camera was mounted on a focusing rail to allow it to be evenly moved along to create a set of images for stacking. I put a 2 inch spring clamp on the little knob on the focusing rail, which became a small lever that greatly improved my ability to make fine adjustments to the rails’ position.

A Pentax 50mm DFA f2.8 macro lens was used for the first image. This was just a straight macro shot - the lens was set to it’s closes focus point and then mounted on an additional 68mm of extension tubes yielded about 2.4x lifesized magnification. This was shot with the lens wide open at f2.8. With the extension the effective aperture was f7, which should be below the threshold where diffraction starts to limit sharpness. I am lucky enough to have an old set of extension tubes with full electronic contacts, so the TTL flash handled the exposure just fine.

The second photo was made using an Otamat 10mm f1.7 lens mounted on the K01 along with 68mm of extension. I bought this and the 20mm Otamat lens some time ago, but never got around to experimenting with them. The lens I have is mounted on a Pentax body cap so it just attached directly to the extension tubes. I held a ruler up to the lens and just over 2mm filled the frame. Since the K01’s sensor is 23.7mm wide, its safe to say the magnification of this setup was about 10x. Backing into the aperture calculation, the effective aperture would around f19, so diffraction would be expected. Since TTL flash is not supported for the Otamat lens (no contacts to communicate with the body) I just shot with manual flash, which was easily done by taking a few test shots and adjusting the flash’s power setting. This this case the stack was over 100 images (very shallow depth of field.) Unfortunately, this image is just not as sharp as I’d like - I assume due to diffraction.

Both images were stacked in Zerene Stacker. I initially stacked them both in Photoshop CS6, but this was very time consuming and produced poor results - lots of halos and other artifacts.

I’m hoping to explore this technique a little more, hopefully with some more appealing subjects. I have to say - after impaling the stinkbug on a pin, I immediately understood how they got their name!