Week 8 - Texture
I was very excited for this weeks challenge…
and I knew that I was going to have a surplus of options to photograph. My original goal was to shoot 9 images and do a 3x3 grid of images. I wanted each image to convey a different texture. Just due to the nature of showing texture, I decided to go with macro photography.
I really wanted the viewer to be able to “feel” the texture in each shot. I envisioned very close up, and sharp from front to back. I realized this was going to mean focus stacking, if i wanted true front to back sharpness. My camera has a function where it can do “focus bracketing” and I have been trying to figure out how exactly it works.
You set the initial focus spot, set the step width that it takes with each shot, and then a maximum amount of shots you want it to take before it stops. I have a lot more experimenting to do with this…no matter what I did or how I set it up, it would just take the amount of shots I set it to. It never stopped prior to that, already achieving sharpness to infinity. This doesn’t sound like a big deal at first, but it basically just means that I ended up with an absolute mountain of images that needed focus stacking.
I will continue to play around with these settings, but for the time being I just focus stacked a ton of images. To say my laptop struggled with stacking these images would be an understatement. If you truly want to test the strength of your PC, try focus stacking 15+ GB of images. My laptop sounded like a NASA launch site. But to its credit, it managed to complete the stack.
I would be interested in hearing an opinion from others, but I believe there are still some areas that look blurry in the images. To me it looks like motion blur, but that shouldn’t be possible, I had my camera sitting on the floor and I turned off image stabilization.
Just due to life, I only ended getting 3 of my original goal of 9 photos, but that’s okay, I think I learned a lot and I also got to play around with Macro photography which I always like doing.
I ended up using a strawberry, a crystal, and a pile of sugar coated candies.
The strawberry was the immediate texture that jumped into my head when I read the challenge prompt. The other two just came down to looking around my office for things I thought had interesting textures. The strawberry photo is my least favorite of the three. I just couldn’t get it to look appealing no matter what I did, and as I mentioned before, to me it looks like the seeds aren’t as sharp as they should be.
I really liked how the light refracted, reflected, and shined on the crystal when photographing it. The hard part of that picture was choosing which area of the surface to focus on.
The candy picture was pretty simple, just had to make sure that I washed my hands in between staging it all and touching any of my camera gear or accessories, lol.
I hope you like the images this week, you can click on each one to blow it up to full size. I apologize my post is late this week, had a lot going on with work and was just exhausted.
