Macro view of fall leaves
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
Click the image above to start a slide show of the various image in this set. The slide show application has various tools including a button at bottom right to zoom to full screen. Let go of your mouse or trackpad and the slideshow will run automatically to the end or until you stop it. Use your browser’s back button (left arrow) to return here.
This is a collection of images taken of fall leaves from a variety of trees around our house in the past few years. I’ll add more to this collection later this fall.
All of these images were done with a Canon EOS 5D camera and almost all of them were done with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. A tripod and remote shutter release was used.
Because the leaves curl and because I wanted to shoot them with back light, I made a jig to hold them which consisted of two small pieces of mat board with a small rectangle cut out of the middle (about 1.5 inches by 1 inch) so that a leaf could be sandwiched in. This “sandwich” is then clamped together and hung so that I can shoot straight at it with natural light coming in from behind. The key is to get the rig absolutely parallel to the front of the lens (I used a level) so that the leaf would be in focus edge to edge. In macro photography, even stopped way down, depth of field is very shallow so the more one can take care of these things in setup the better.
I hope to repeat this technique this year with my new 5D Mk II and maybe a newer macro lens. Stay tuned.
Wonderful image Richard. I love the detail and color. Thanks for sharing your setup, pretty interesting.
Thanks Frank. I’m assuming you saw the other images in the collection, maybe full screen. I’m still trying to find the best way to show these images as a collection/slide show.
The setup is easy, a poor person’s light table so that I can shoot straight across rather than straight down. The key is getting the leaf flat. I hope to do another one soon to see if I still remember how!
oh yes, on full screen it looks amazing.
Ah, great Gedas, glad you were able to look at it like that. Thanks, delighted you like them. I hope to take some more next week.
A while ago I played with Simpleviewer, a nice java applet that allows you to display your images as a slideshow. It has a WordPress plugin and might just fit the bill. The setup is pretty easy and makes quite an impact.
http://www.simpleviewer.net/simpleviewer/
Frank: I played with Simpleviewer and others like it a while ago and even with its flickr integration it’s still (in my opinion) not as clean as a full screen flickr slide show. While flickr’s slide show tools aren’t integrated into this site, I like the fact that once you get used to viewing things this way (click the image, zoom out to full screen, when the show is done hit the back button on browser) it’s quite clean and simple.
But that’s just my opinion and I’m always open to feedback and suggestions. Thanks.
Wow, fantastic images, Richard. I’ve been learning about fractal geometry in nature lately, and am fascinated – your images are great examples of these vascular patterns. Funny, what I find lovely and altogether “as it should be” in nature, as in a leaf seen close up, I find utterly horrifying in sprawling, runaway “artificial” suburban development. (The first image, for example, reminds me of a Google Earth image of, say, Littleton, CO – it just doesn’t strike me as a mentally-healthy development pattern for humans, call me old-fashioned.) I guess it’s all in the context.
Enjoying checking in on your blog, as always.
Thanks Jola. Interestingly, while I would never want to live in Littleton, CO or in any modern suburban sprawl they’re fascinating to see from the air.
I posted a google map of Sun City, AZ a while back, I think it’s exactly what you’re talking about.
http://www.richardsnotes.org/archives/2009/05/17/sun-city-arizona/
Patterns are fantastic wherever we find them.
Richard, These photos are fantastic. I am so moved by your creativity and ingenuity. About half way through I had this feeling of recognition, and what it amounts to are your photos from the sky! The photos over San Francisco (the evaporation ponds), over LA, and in the western desert. Anyway, the colors and patterns are awesome. Way to go!
Thanks Scott. The leaves were shot a while ago but I just put them into a slide show so they could be viewed larger and more quickly.
Maybe I’ll do an aerial slide show next… maybe I should mix them!
I agree with Scott James! I had forgotten about the image of Sun City that you’d posted (but yes, looking at it again, my memory’s refreshed), and I didn’t make the formal connection between your leaf closeups and the aerial shots you take. But of course they’re connected! I like your idea of mixing the images in a slide show – connecting the “dots.”
Jola: Stay tuned… I’ll make such a slide show soon. Thanks.