Mceek2
Winter Macro
I used a piece of black felt on the ground to collect snow falling from the sky. I waited a relatively long time, about an hour, for the felt to cool down, but which also included a piece of plexiglass on which I placed crystals on. I also used a smaller piece of felt placed about four inches below the plexiglass to try to create the darkest background possible in-camera, but the plexiglass was wiped about once every five minutes because of too much snow falling on it, and that created smears that were wiped off. It was about twenty three degrees during the entirety of looking and photographing the snow, about two hours in total. The snow during most of that time fell in enormous amounts, but relatively slowly and was made up of an enormous variety of crystals. To get more than just a few worthwhile photos like this is usually much time. One thing that can be great is when the sky is overcast, which can make for perfectly diffused, even, lighting without shadows. It's especially great if during such time, it's either snowing very lightly or not at all and without wind soon after a snowfall. The lens used for this, the Mitakon 20mm 4X (set at F/5.6) for this photo is limiting in the fact that the magnification range is small or nearly nonexistent, meaning that to photograph large crystals such as stellar dendrites can take up about eight or more times longer and require that much more photos to be able to increase depth of field in post processing as well as to stitch the focus stacks into a large mosaic, though such a process can be done the other way around, which in theory might work but in practice is very impractical (focus stacking multiple mosaics). The use of less magnification has been a desire of mine (but not less than 1X) because it can in theory result in more depth of field and less light might be needed to achieve a perfect photo; in general, smaller magnification can make macro photography easier and, at least for depth of field, can make for better rendition of fine details.
Winter Macro
I used a piece of black felt on the ground to collect snow falling from the sky. I waited a relatively long time, about an hour, for the felt to cool down, but which also included a piece of plexiglass on which I placed crystals on. I also used a smaller piece of felt placed about four inches below the plexiglass to try to create the darkest background possible in-camera, but the plexiglass was wiped about once every five minutes because of too much snow falling on it, and that created smears that were wiped off. It was about twenty three degrees during the entirety of looking and photographing the snow, about two hours in total. The snow during most of that time fell in enormous amounts, but relatively slowly and was made up of an enormous variety of crystals. To get more than just a few worthwhile photos like this is usually much time. One thing that can be great is when the sky is overcast, which can make for perfectly diffused, even, lighting without shadows. It's especially great if during such time, it's either snowing very lightly or not at all and without wind soon after a snowfall. The lens used for this, the Mitakon 20mm 4X (set at F/5.6) for this photo is limiting in the fact that the magnification range is small or nearly nonexistent, meaning that to photograph large crystals such as stellar dendrites can take up about eight or more times longer and require that much more photos to be able to increase depth of field in post processing as well as to stitch the focus stacks into a large mosaic, though such a process can be done the other way around, which in theory might work but in practice is very impractical (focus stacking multiple mosaics). The use of less magnification has been a desire of mine (but not less than 1X) because it can in theory result in more depth of field and less light might be needed to achieve a perfect photo; in general, smaller magnification can make macro photography easier and, at least for depth of field, can make for better rendition of fine details.