Reductio ad absurdum gradus

A musical, metal contraption, side-lit by a candle, and rendered in black and white.

 

In January 2017 I started my journey with Flickr and the Macro Mondays group in particular with my first contribution Satsuma-Rise.

 

What a fun year it’s been! Sometimes, fairly flummoxed by the fiendish themes, the dopamine rush of actually producing something... anything... that might qualify has been most exhilarating.

 

But much more important than that are the friends I have made and enjoyed chatting with, and the superb images I have admired and been challenged and inspired by.

 

The theme Redux 2017 - My Favorite Theme of the Year, quite typically, gave me a problem. Which one to redo? Strangely the theme that got me thinking most was Contraption whereas the one I had most fun actually doing was Intentional Blur. I was very tempted to have another go with the latter but you might never have seen me again if I pandered to that particular addiction :)

 

So, for a bit of fun, I decided to offer tribute to as many as I could of the themes that I enjoyed in one rather contrived image.

 

This is an image of a clockwork Japanese musical box which is designed as a keyring fob. They were mass-produced and popular decades ago, and I’ve ended up with two of them. This one has a picture of Mount Fuji on the cover and plays a short tune which I can’t identify.

 

The object is quite small: the barrel carrying the music (on the right of the image) is just 1 cm long.

 

The base theme Contraption but I have also included:

- Member's Choice: Made of Metal

- Sidelit

- Member's Choice - Musical Instruments

- Lit by Candlelight

- Member's Choice: B&W

- Inspired by a song (Musicbox Dancer) (with thanks to Caroline Caroline.32 - see comments )

 

So that makes six - now seven, thanks to Caroline - (though strictly speaking it wouldn’t have qualified for the B&W theme because I have toned it slightly to increase the available tonal range in the JPEG and hence the perceived visual quality). I guess I could have added some fingers, bokeh, and motion blur with the mechanism going and called it a souvenir, but madness should only be allowed limited licence...

 

For the composition I particularly liked the gears and the tempered steel sounding prongs being activated by the drum pins so I tried to bring those out.

 

But that created a problem. Because it’s so small and the lighting poor even at f/25 the depth of field was too shallow and the exposure quite long enough at 15 to 30 seconds for the bouncy dining room floor supporting the tripod. I suspected a narrower aperture wouldn’t add that much detail either because of diffraction effects that start to dominate at that end of the aperture range.

 

So I had a play with focus stacking for the first time. This is the result of a stack of six images focused from the gears down to the nearside tuning pins.

 

The title means Bringing back to the absurd degree which seems quite appropriate for my antics (and a fitting tribute to my old Latin master who was quite the scariest teacher I ever had...).

 

Thank you for taking time to look. I really hope you enjoy the image!

 

Happy Macro Mondays, Happy New Year and thanks for all the fun and friendship :)

 

[Side-lit with a tealight candle. Tripod mount; delayed shutter, VR off; Live View for the manual focus. Stack of six raw images processed in Affinity Photo using defaults (I had no idea what I was doing lol).

 

I tried adjusting things in colour before conversion but it was a mess so this is a straight conversion of the stack result using the free Nik Silver Efex with slightly toned options.

 

Then just a dark vignette in Photo. Very unusually for me there is no crop: it’s the stack output size from the full source images! ]

Done