Focus Pocus
Many vintage lenses have a nicely textured focus ring for a good grip, look, and feel, and so does the focus ring of my vintage Olympus Zuiko lens. Its focus ring is embossed with hundreds (I didn't count them) of tiny "diamonds", and I was curious to see how they looked when getting extra close with the Laowa Ultra Macro lens.
At first, I went for colour (of course...), put the red transparent plastic lid in front of one LED lamp and the green bottle in front of the other (I also tried blue instead of green and all three colours together) but, surprise, it was too much even for me. So I tried a different approach: I used the natural light photo lamp from above as my main light source and pointed one of the LEDs against the gold-coated cardboard cake board "reflector" (which I held above the focus ring) for a single, warm colour accent.
This indeed yielded the nicest-looking results. I also went for a shallow DOF with lots of rhombic bokeh (a single shot), which helped transform the expected macro dust into tiny bokeh balls. I still removed some dust in Photoshop, especially on the in-focus diamonds. Maybe a soft brush would have helped remove more of the dust than the microfibre cloth did but I hope it's still pleasant to look at ;)
HMM, Everyone!
Focus Pocus
Many vintage lenses have a nicely textured focus ring for a good grip, look, and feel, and so does the focus ring of my vintage Olympus Zuiko lens. Its focus ring is embossed with hundreds (I didn't count them) of tiny "diamonds", and I was curious to see how they looked when getting extra close with the Laowa Ultra Macro lens.
At first, I went for colour (of course...), put the red transparent plastic lid in front of one LED lamp and the green bottle in front of the other (I also tried blue instead of green and all three colours together) but, surprise, it was too much even for me. So I tried a different approach: I used the natural light photo lamp from above as my main light source and pointed one of the LEDs against the gold-coated cardboard cake board "reflector" (which I held above the focus ring) for a single, warm colour accent.
This indeed yielded the nicest-looking results. I also went for a shallow DOF with lots of rhombic bokeh (a single shot), which helped transform the expected macro dust into tiny bokeh balls. I still removed some dust in Photoshop, especially on the in-focus diamonds. Maybe a soft brush would have helped remove more of the dust than the microfibre cloth did but I hope it's still pleasant to look at ;)
HMM, Everyone!