Week 5 - The Eye
I had the idea for this weeks theme immediately. I have always found super close macro shots of eyes interesting. The different textures, lines, divots, are just so neat!
What purpose does each one serve? If I have more of these loops, do I have better night vision? If I have more of these lines, can I see further?
I am rambling, but long story short, I have always liked these kind of photos.
There is also a very obvious similarity between the human eye and the aperture of a lens. They both open and close to limit the amount of light that is coming in.
Once I knew what i wanted to do, it was just coming up with a plan on how to do it. I was confident I would have to take two images and combine them in Photoshop. I figured doing the shot of the eye would be the hard part so I decided to try to get that one first.
Saying the shot of the eye was hard to get is an understatement. I assumed it would be hard, but I wasn’t counting on how difficult it was to get a usable shot of my eye. This was due to a couple factors.
Having adequate light for the photo means having a VERY bright light shining directly in your eye. This isnt the most comfortable thing to do, and also causes your eye to begin watering.
Focus distance and macro lens. I thought just throwing on my macro lens would be enough to get a close enough shot of my eye. I actually found that even at the minimum focus distance for my lens, it still wasn’t close enough. Luckily, I had extension tubes that i bought years ago, these helped get me close enough to get the shot.
When in this close, every tiny movement is visible. It was very hard to keep my head and eye still in order to get a shot without motion blur.
It took a little but of experimentation, but I managed to overcome all the issues and get the shot.
Next was the picture of the aperture blades!
I first set out looking at each one of my lenses to see which one I liked the aesthetics of. I thought the 70-200 just due to its size would be the obvious choice, but found out that the aperture is actually set much further back in the lens, which caused it to not really work.
After going through my array of lenses, i decided on my 24-70. At the same time, experimenting on aperture sizes for the shot, I decided on F8.
Getting this shot was pretty straight forward, sat the lens on some wooden planks, shined some light at the front element, Snap!
I had both of my pictures, time to take them into Lightroom for initial edits and then the follow on into Photoshop.
I knew my Photoshop skills were lacking, but trying to do something as simple as merging these two pictures in a way that looked good…REALLY showed that my Photoshop skills needed some improvement. I wont write it ALL out here but after watching a couple of YouTube videos and a lot of mistakes…the shots were combined!
I really liked this weeks theme, and this is my favorite photo of the challenge so far. I am very much enjoying the creativity and thought it is forcing me to cultivate.
