It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been more or less on a blogging break – undecisive of wether to continue or quit the whole thing. For now it seems that I’ll be continuing but we’ll see how it goes.

Today is the Midsummer day in Finland. It’s celebrated every year on a Saturday close to the Winter Solstice day which this year is tomorrow, the 21st. Midsummer here is “the night of no night” – when the sun doesn’t set. That phenomena is also called “the white nights”. In Midsummer the flags exceptionally(* stay up in the poles through the night from Friday evening 6 pm until 9 pm Saturday evening.

This photo was taken in the midnight three weeks ago – so it wasn’t really a “white night“. However, close to it as you see.

*) Normal rules in Finland say that the flag must not be in the pole after the sunset – or 6 pm or something when the days are shorter. But sincethe sun doesn’t set in the Midsummer the flag will stay up through the night.

It’s been a busy week and continues to be so until Tuesday at least. I haven’t posted since Sunday so I thought - to post at least something – I’d give you a couple of my damson plum macros to fill up some space here. I’ll be out of town for the weekend – hopefully I’ll come back with some beautiful photos from the Finnish countryside. Until then, here’s some spring beauty, again captured with the 60 mm macro and an extension tube.

This one is one of my absolute favourites:

Last week we had a beautiful spring rain that left small drops everywhere. So of course I had to go out and explore things with my macro equipment… This damson plum flower was captured with the 60 mm canon macro attached to a 36 mm extension tube, using F16. Beautiful!

But the real treat was when I was looking at the photos in their full size. Here’s a 100% crop from the first photo (sadly it doesn’t fit here in full size). Yes, it shows that the photo isn’t quite sharp – full sharpness is very difficult to achieve, especially without a slider head on my tripod – but to find an entire world inside a 2 mm droplet… wow!

Fiddled with the template last night. The worst (and the only considerable) defect of WordPress.org blogs is that you can’t use a custom template without paying (like you can in Blogger if only you know what you’re doing). And the selection of templates is really limited! This look may change pretty soon again because I’m not sure at all I like it.

Fresh from the post office today:

Yay! I’m happy. The below scenery is from the very trip where I trashed my old lens – these were taken maybe 15 minutes later (the place of the accident is behind those bushy trees). However, these pics have been post-processed pretty heavily: I’ve lightened the front part to get some detail out of the stones – and the clouds are from another photo, taken another day in another city. The cloud photo was taken at noon so I’ve added a coloured filter on the clouds to give them the same tone of sunset as the rest of the picture has. Which one do you like the best?

And as you can see in the categories of this post, these were taken with my Tamron 17-50 mm lens.

I like this portrait one because there are more stones. The island in the horizon looks rather funny to me – like a lost street broom or something. And the bushy trees on the right make it difficult to change the sky. In a photo this small it’s not a problem but with bigger prints I don’t think it works.

This second picture doesn’t have the bushy trees and the island doesn’t seem so lost because of the woods on the left and I like the openness of this landscape. It gives a sense of a sort of tranquil peace. And yes, I know the horizon should not be in the middle of the picture…

So… I finally have a new lens on the way to replace the old broken one. It should arrive on Friday so I still have a couple of days to do some macro-ing… In this post I’m showing you how the Damson Plum in our garden is getting all dressed up for the summer.

For all this photos I’ve used my Canon 60 mm macro along with a Kenko 36 mm extension tube.

The first photo was taken on May 6th when the tree still didn’t have any open leaves. The bud’s real size was maybe 5-7 mm in diameter. The magnification ratio of the lens is 1:1 so someone wise enough (I’m not, even after some serious web surfing) could count the magnification ratio with the extension tube…

The second photo was taken ten days later, May 16th – with the same lens combination. The original bud size about 5 mm, if not less.

And the last trio the next day, May 17th. Now maybe half of the flowers are open but I don’t have any macros of them – and now there’s too much wind to even try. But isn’t it fascinating how macro photos make things look totally different? Behind ordinary “faces” there are zillions of suddle details, just too small for human eyes to see.

I still don’t have a new tele zoom so I’m still experimenting with my trusted 60 mm macro – along with a couple of Kenko extension tubes. Today my target was (among other things) water melon.

For this first photo I had a 36 mm extension tube between the macro lens and the camera. The light came from the normal kitchen lights (therefore the weird white balance) – but in addition to them I lit the melon from below: The slice was on a glass plate which in turn was on a tall juice glass. In the glass there was a flashlight pointing upwards through the melon (I was photographing straight from above the slice). I wanted a stronger effect from the light but the battery must’ve been a bit weak… And again I had some trouble with focusing, due to the lack of contrast but more than that, because of the shallow dof, caused by the macro-extension tube combination.

The next one was with the same combination, just a different angle. And not from above but from the side and without the flashlight. I think the seed holes came out pretty nice with the aperture of 10.

For this last one I added another extension tube (12 mm). I really can’t say this looks very delicious…

This photo did not turn into what I thought it would be after some post-processing. I took it when I was location hunting on May Day (the sad day when I wrecked my 70-200 mm lens). This dad was obviously teaching his daughter to fish. The day was very bright and the sun came almost towards me so these two were pretty much nothing but a silhouette at the end of the dock.

It might work better as a b&w but I didn’t want that. I just cropped it, enhanced the contrast to get rid of all the detail in the people – then I boosted the blue saturation to make the sea look better.

This was taken with my Tamron 17-50 f2.8, hand held – and those two didn’t have a clue about being photographed…

Today while shopping with the girls I played with my cell phone. It’s a Nokia N95 with a 5 mp “camera”. I’m refusing to call pics taken with it “photography”, but I have to admit sometimes the toy surprises me pleasantly.

I took this pic because I thought the straws looked pretty interesting :) But looking at it at home made me realize that it also has other interesting aspects: The bright colours, red and blue – and the almost-yellow wall. But also the curves bend very interestingly towards each other at the left side. I bet the scholars would easily come up with a series of educational comments about this image :D (hmm.. like saying that the vertical lines are slanted so it would need some straightening up!)

This evening the light had almost gone when I went outside to play a bit with my macro. Last night we had the long waited rain and this morning everything had suddenly turned green. The leaves still are very small – like these ones, diameter less than 1 cm – but still they’re beautiful green. And if something is small then it’s a perfect target for a macro lens, right?

For this one I used my trusted Canon 60 mm macro attached to a Kenko 30 mm extension tube. I’m still marvelling how tiny an aperture one has to use to achieve any dof whatsoever with this combinatio (F10 for this photo). Photographing handheld is in no way possible and even a monopod isn’t enough (at least for me it isn’t – my hands are so not steady!). I used a good tripod – and not just that: I timed the shutter to go off two seconds after I pressed it to avoid camera shake!

Since my tele lens is out of the picture (see the previous post) I spent some time playing with my macro. I tried different variations – a wide lens with a close up lens, macro with a close up lens – but this was taken with my 60 mm macro attached at the end of an extension tube (30 mm I think…?) The bubbles are inside a water bottle and their real size is less than a millimetre. The pic is taken inside without any artificial light source. The camera was mounted on a tripod. The postprocessing was nothing but an unsharp mask and adding the watermark so the pic is pretty much sooc. Kinda fun :)

Here’s a 100% crop of the pic. As you can see the bubbles aren’t really pin sharp at the edges – but with those magnification ratios (more than 1:1) the dof is really, really limited – even with a very small aperture (F13 in this pic) and because the object is round you must decide where to focus. And to focus even to the selected part is very difficult! I need to practise some more – and visit an eye doctor…