Ice Spikes

I've never shot snowflakes before, and decided to give it a whack today, during our 8th snow in just over a month. I had decided to shoot them this morning around 8:30am when the flakes falling were still flakes.

By the time I got out later in the morning, the air had warmed up and the flakes were clumps of ice spikes instead. I snagged a few shots of the clumpy spiky stuff. I'll try to get something more snowflakey another time.

As an aside, pretty much everything I know about shooting snowflakes and other crystals (as well as the methods I use to shoot many other subjects in macro/micro), I learned by reading about Ken Liebbrecht's work at Caltech. So, thanks Ken, if you ever read this!

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Painterly, Intricate Lacework

I've had my first downtime in what seems like months, and had the opportunity to shoot at our friends' country house which previously yielded microphotos of Peacock Feathers and BeeBalm [Monarda] flowers. Luckily for me, the old farmhouse windows iced up dramatically in the recent bitterly cold wind and snow, and these intricate, beautiful patterns emerged overnight.

The size of the photos presented here don't do these pictures justice—they really should be turned into huge prints and hung as modern art (hint, hint). Maybe as an early Valentine's gift for your honey?

But to really show how much detail was contained in these iced windows, in an area about the size of a quarter, below is a cropped portion of the photo from above, followed by several more photos of the icy panes.

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Ice Fishies

Just a quick post today. This is one of my favorite ice bubble photos that I've taken. I was lucky to have the opportunity to see it printed huge for an installation I did at the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. It looks great huge (60" x 90") as well as on screen!

To me, this looks like a photo of fish swimming up a stream.

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Peacock Feathers

We recently stayed at our friends' beautiful country house and I had a little time to shoot around the property, finding some neat little things I'll post here in the coming days.

One part-time resident of the farmhouse is a peacock who wanders on and off the yard occasionally, eating Scott's lavender. The peacock has left many of his stunning feathers around the place, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to shoot them and see what makes them shine like they do.

The photo above is of an area about an inch wide. I then zoomed in for the photo below, which is an area about 5mm wide. The individual strands of feather (called barbs) appear to be metallic themselves, and made of little sections.

What follows are a few more microphotos of the different parts of the peacock feather. Some look like christmas garland or pine tree branches to me; more amazing evidence of nature's incredible symmetry and cohesiveness, or its lack of imagination. Depends on your viewpoint.

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Pinpoint

This the the pin, stuck into the skin of my thumb. I know, it's kind of gross, but I wanted to see what it would look like.

Below is the pin point, without my thumb. Below that is a closer crop of the tip.

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Yet Another Weird Seed Pod Thing

This little deal fell off of a local tree, it's soft and fuzzy and seems to have tiny seeds in it. It's about 2cm long and of course looks strange when we look up close!

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Popcorn!

The bizarre and tiny world of popcorn. As I thought would be the case, popcorn's structure is cellular/bubbly, like foam. I thought it best to shoot macro/micro photos of popcorn before buttering.

The giant cave you see above is the edge of a popcorn shell inside a popped piece of corn. Don't look too closely, you might get it stuck in your tooth. Below are a few more shots of the strange textural landscape of a piece of popcorn.

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Creepy Doll Eye

You know those dolls with the eyes that open and close? They're creepy right?

Here's a closeup of the eye of one. You can look deep into the empty cold soul of this doll if you stare long enough. But you must be brave. For she is also looking deeply into yours... Creeeeepy.

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Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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LED Christmas Lights

Here are the best microphotos I can get right now of the light-emitting diode (LED) inside an energy-efficient LED Christmas light. You can see that the electronics inside are different than the glowing tungsten filament in a standard incandescent mini Christmas light, which we've looked at before.

LEDs work differently than incandescent lights, use far less energy, and generate far less heat. To get these photos, I actually had to shoot many frames because of the way LEDs work. They strobe very fast, blinking on and off many times a second. This aspect of their function meant that about half the photos I took of the diode came out completely black.

I also found it interesting that the blue diode appeared to have two attaching wires at the top as opposed to the single lead on the orange diode above. While I don't know why they are different in this way, I do know that there are differences in the ways different colored diodes function. Getting the right light frequency is apparently part art and part science.

Another LED tidbit is that white LED lights are actually not white. Rather, they are made from one of the other LED colors tuned to a very desaturated color within its frequency.

I'm gonna say I'm about 98% right on that bit of cocktail party knowledge. It's knowledge for a geek cocktail party, but a cocktail party nonetheless.

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Christmas Light Filaments

These are the glowing hot filaments inside of an incandescent mini Christmas light. These are typically made of tungsten. I haven't figured out how to get a good shot of one of our LED Christmas lights yet.

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Sweet & Low, Equal, Splenda, and Sugar

Sweet & Low crystals.

I've been complaining about the shortage of sugar at the office, which I use in my coffee and oatmeal in the morning. And I've been forced by this situation to use sugar substitutes.

In my taste tests, I've found the Sweet & Low to be the most awful-tasting of the sugar substitutes. So bad that it gives the other sugar substitutes a bad rap. Above is a photo of the Sweet & Low product, which appears to be composed of irregular gnarly crystals.

Equal nubs.

I found Equal to be the second worst in my taste tests. Actually, the difference in sweetness and aftertaste between Equal and Sweet & Low is quite dramatic, with Equal being the far better of the two. Its sweetness, however, is still lacking in comparison to real sugar, and it does still leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Splenda nubby crystals.

Splenda, one of the newer kids in the artificial sweetener world, is the best of the three fakers I tasted. It leaves the least bitter aftertaste and has the sweetest flavor of the three in this taste test. I believe it would still be very easy, however, to discern the difference between Splenda and real sugar in a blind taste test (which I did not conduct).

Raw cane sugar crystals.

Above is some good old raw cane sugar. Yum. The best in my taste test. Sweet and warm and a touch of caramel flavor.

Since I believe a naturally-occurring food product to be better for my health than a manufactured one, I'll be sticking with the classic sugar, thankyouverymuch.

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Little Acorn, Tick, Price Label

The acorn above was about 10mm wide, a teensy tiny little acorn found in the park while the girls climbed and played.

Below is a photo of the dried remains of the tick that tried to eat Sarah alive. She found it on her leg after we returned from Stone Barns, a beautiful farm near Westchester, NY. She was worried she had popped its head off when she yanked it out, so we're happy to see the head intact here. This tick was about 1.2 - 2mm long.

This pic isn't super sharp to my liking—I had to use my extra macro adapter to make the tick large enough for the photo and this affects the sharpness. What happens at magnifications this high, with lenses as big as the 65mm MP-E, is a distortion called diffraction. Essentially, overall sharpness decreases with high magnification and high f-stop (small aperture). This is different than a shallow depth of field, which we also experience in high-magnification photography.

OK, enough with the macro/microphotography lesson!

At the bottom, we have a close-up of the print on a price label. I love the distressed typography and the texture of paper pulp.

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