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The Weather
is really not much to write home about - and has since those lovely 21°C we had several days ago, turned into chilly, at times even frost bitten weather. Some sunshine during the day, though, but also plenty of clouds. The MAX temperatures do not even reach 10°C.
It is kind of funny... the theme of "climate change" and "Global Warming" - because in so many ways, with more CO2, and slightly warmer climate - then yes, it certainly benefits humanity a great deal. While cold, chilly or frostbitten weather... does not.
It is cold that kills
The death rates for cold deaths is 10-15x higher than for heat related deaths. And with extreme pushed prices on energy... any colder weather makes it very difficult for people, even in the west, to survive economically, given how extreme everything has gotten, from food and electricity prices to everything else.
An exclusive club for mutual masturbation.
Boy they really hate humanity, don't they. But billionaires and banksters never had any love for humanity, other than themselves. An exclusive club for mutual masturbation - and you are not invited, honey.
Playing with Macro
It was only yesterday I played a little bit with macro - as I didn't feel so well during the past week - it all got delayed and uninspired. But it was fun to play with it yesterday. I am still at this extremely amateurish level, where I kind of try to get the hang of the technical aspects. You know, to get a feeling, what different things are doing, how various motives look like, etc. But there isn't so much creativity involved at this stage.
Of course I like my photos - but at the same time, there isn't much special about them. It's more a fascination of how very small things look like. But there are many photographers who specialized into macro - who just makes such an amazing job... it often blows my mind.
The above image of the Celery stalks I kind of like. Especially the area to the right, which lies in the shadows, deeper within. That's the area i really love; the subdued light in there, yet you can make out the fine details in the scruffy leafs. It looks so cool !
I assume that in the near future, I contine to explore various leafs, plants and fruits - just to see how it looks like. I did it for example with a cut in half lemon, which I kept openly in the fridge for a couple of days. But it looked so-so.
Followed by a slice of Carrot, looking like the surface of the sun.
Coffee Bean
In the last image, showing a small section of a coffee bean. That image spans only a few millimieters across, and i thre in everything onto the Olympus OM ED 90/3.5 IS PRO Macro lens [180 mm], combined with a 1.4x tele converter & an 16 mm extension tube.
You are litterally taking images with a 250 mm lens in super macro mode.
The sharpness becomes a bit problematic (fuzzy) when you combine everything like that, and I feel the "benefits" are doubtful. The final enlargement of the image, is equivalent to around 7x macro, I believe.
Zerene Stacker
I played around with the program a while, and do like it. Albeit the interface is so aincent, that it hurts. Having to click away popup notifications like "OK" this, and "OK" that, is soooo early 1990 on a Macintosh.
The images tend to come out slightly noise to my taste, but did a splendid way of dealing with sharp detals in shadows - staying sharp. While Photoshop's built in stacking script, renders such areas blurry.
But I couldn't get the hang of the halo phenomena in Zerene Stacker. Against, it's the parameters I don't understand, how to do, or which one to set, in order to eliminate the halo-effect.
Helicon Focus
from Ukraine, was a disaster (for me) - but extremely fast and had a lovely interface. But... I just couldn't figure things out, and got horrible (unusable) results. I know - that is my fault, because i really didn't know what to do what so ever. No clue how to even align a bunch of bracketed images... (it appears the software does it automatically when you press "render" - but works only, if you set correct parameters, it seems). It felt very frustrating. Even the homepage didn't give me that much of clues, really.
So, I got weird results, misaligned fine details (when using handheld focus bracketed images) and tossed the software away.
Lots to learn...
My ignorance in terms of "professional" stacking software is almost 0. Makes me at this point feel like i am sitting on a boat in an ocean, but i hope to learn more about the parameters, and the effects in images, when changing them...
As of now, I tend to lean towards Zerene Stacker, which seems very clunky, but precise - and at my low level of (no) knowledge with this program - I still managed to get usable results, which i favored over Photoshop, because Zerene Stacker didn't create all these strange, blurry blobs between fine detailed areas.
The fun of focus bracketing
Nevertheless - it is utmost fun to focus bracket images and then "stitch" together into an image with much greater depth showing sharp details. The results, remind me a bit of "electron microscopy", where everything appears sharp in depth, with a strange kind of plasticity / 3D dimensional look - only now in color. Well, I am talking about the people who specialize in extreme macro of tiny critters, showing every little hair... often looks "electron microscopy" like - and tiny, tiny insects looks like overwhelming monsters... And those images are done with MANUAL super macro or microscop lenses together with specialized rail movements (taking a focus bracketed image every micro millimeter)
Exciting world to explore
And yeah, it doesn't have to be that advanced, really. As I mentioned earlier, I also like casual close ups, without that everything needs to be sharp. Often such images can create a dreamy atmosphere, very different compared to ultra sharp images in the finest detail.
Or casual snapshots
Then there is the category of "casual macro snapshots", lingering between close up and macro. Here i used the Olympus filters you can apply on images, making them (sometimes) fun to look at.
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