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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Bee Balm

The photo above was clearly the winning picture today at the Hoboken Artists Studio Tour, as far as crowd reaction goes. This photo of the stalk under the petals of a Monarda bloom was the most well received image I showed today. Last year's crowd favorite (judged by observation) was the tap water, which you can see here.

If you missed it, by the way, I was mentioned in two different articles about the Studio Tour. One was an artist profile at the Jersey Journal (Adam Saynuk, Micro Photography) and the other was at the Hoboken Reporter (Showcasing Art in the Mile Square).

The photo that drew the second place (in terms of gasps and "no ways!") was the microphoto image of bread, as you can see below. Bread, it appears, is nothing more than cavernous bubbles encased in clear starchy, gluteny wisps.

I would say the third most liked (or "wowed") photo was the next photo down of mold on a chocolate cake. This field of flowers seemed to fascinate everyone for the same reason many of the other images did, because it's so unexpected.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see my work today!

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Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Water!

Here are a few photos of very tiny water drops which clung to a mushroom or fungus growing out of the shady side of a tree stump. I like how they look so round, the seem to be caught in motion while rolling down the side. But they were all stationary, in reality.

In the first photo above, my flash had failed to fire, so this picture is the result of some extreme exposure adjustment to compensate for the lack of light. But I like the color and graininess anyway, so here it is. The other photos are the result of my flash firing as I'd planned and are fascinating for their own reasons. I like the look of the focused light landing on the mushroom surface after having traveled through the lens of water.

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The Dandiest of Lions

These microphotos show one seed "parachute" from a dandelion, or blow flower. I've shot dandelions like this before while in Canada, here. Though the previous dandelion appears to be a bit different from this one.

Note in the last photo of this series how the seeds attach to the center of the parachute bell by way of a long thin arm, whereas the other dandelion's seeds seem to extend a stylish fin from their parachutes to their flower center.

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Chocolate Cake Mold

Mold started to grow exceptionally fast on a leftover chocolate cake hanging around the kitchen. I think the mold must have grown so quickly because it was a very very good chocolate cake, and not full of preservatives. Note the cool, gnarly little flower-like dealies at the ends of the mold spores.

The total area for the entire patch of mold was smaller than a dime, and it just appears to be a velvety, short, soft whitish-green fuzz. the portion I have shown here is a little smaller than a grain of rice.

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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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Bell Pepper Seeds

Yet another set of photos that turned out better than I thought they would. I was originally just shooting the cut open pepper. And just out of curiosity, I got my macro lens out and started shooting the seeds. They turned out to be beautiful and strange and wonderfully textured.

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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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PureVia, Purple Sugar, and Demerara Sugar

We've already seen several sugar substitutes up close. Above is PureVia, a newer one derived from the zero-calorie sweetener rebaudioside A (rebiana). More lumpy crystals that look white at normal size.

Below is a photo of good ol' regular sugar crystals-- purple ones! These are for cookie and cake decorating. The girls used bales of this stuff for decorating our holiday treats.

Further down is a shot of demerera sugar. In this photo, the sugar crystals look like the giant stones of a sunken Atlantis roadway. I am surprised how un-sugar-like they look, rounded corners and all. I wonder if it is due to the natural impurities present in this type of unprocessed sugar.

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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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