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unknown flower
Riverstone Townhomes, Mountain View, California
Nikon D70, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G VR, Canon 500D close up filter
tripod, sidekick
DxO (wb, blur, distorion, ca, vignette. noise)
f/14 at 1/25 second, 125mm (187mm)
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Does anyone know what flower this is? It's from a bush around my apartment.
Messing around with my Canon 500D close-up diopter on my Nikon 70-200mm VR. I just went into the back yard and took some random shots.
If you want to do close-up photography you have a number of choices:
1) You can buy a “macro” lens (Nikon calls this a “micro” lens to distinguish this from true-macro which is anything greater than 1x magnification)
2) You can get barrel extensions to put the lens further back
3) You can get a diopter filter—a glorified magnifying glass.
I opted for (3). When getting a close up diopter, you can either get a regular single element (cheap) or a two-element one.
Now I noticed there is a lot of B.S. floating on the web about what a two-element diopter does. Look it will not improve acuity one bit. The deal is that the second element acts as an achromat, handling some of the chromatic abberations that result from the mangifing lens element. If you really want to get fancy, you could theoretically handle the chromatic abberations and three separate frequencies using a special extra-low dispersion glass—this is called “apochromat” so you see this advertised as “ED” (Nikon) or “UD” (Canon) or “APO” (Sigma).
There is no apochromatic close-up filter. But there is a achromatic one that fits 77mm lenses such as mine: the Canon 500D Close-Up Lens. Who says this Nikon guy is biased against Canon? :-)
Why not a Micro-Nikkor? Answer: Because I’m cheap.
Why not barrel extensions?
Answer: Because at larger focal lengths, you need more extension. Also, you can use it with the zoom lens to frame the shot and not have to adjust the focusing. It just works. Neat huh?
With this lens, working distance was about a foot and a half. I can get everything from the whole stem down to an individual flower all from the tripod in the same position. This is very welcome change from my Lensbaby, where the working distance is about a centimeter.
Of course, there is some distortion here so you be the judge. I did do manual whitebalancing in the camera using Caitlin's new ExpoDisc warm balancing filter.
(My computer died and I haven't had a chance to install Photoshop yet so this is pretty much an unprocessed photo.)
This sculpture was created by Dave Fisher through a $5000 grant. These cubes made of steel are to remind the viewer of the art of M. C. Escher.
This piece sits on the corner of High & Broad. It was installed in November 2014. It has had mixed reviews from the locals.
I'm continuing to document the spiders that live in my house. I stepped out of the shower to find this arachnid tucked into the fold of my discarded, sweaty sock.