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Photography – Page 4 – Irawan's blog

Category: Photography

Reverse Lens Macro Photography

Doing macro photography could be very fun as you can create a photo that your eyes won’t see in everyday life or bare eyes. It requires a special lens to capture a tiny object as a close up in details. But I just learned recently that you can do a macro photography without special pricy lenses and get a way around it. One of my photographer friends mentioned to me the other week that we can do a macro photography with a reversed lens. I was not sure what he meant at that time but he said it’s literally just reversing your lens back to front.

Not going to elaborate the science of how the reverse lens work but its pretty cool (you can see the science here: https://stephenelliot.com/2007/05/15/reverse-lens-macro-photography-tutorial/). You can just hold your lens back to front against the camera or buy a special reverse lens mount.

So then I did an experiment on it and the result is surprised me, better than I thought. This experiment I used a standard cheap lens kit EFS 18-55mm, I don’t have any insect or something more exciting to capture so I just took whatever I have in the office :

This is how I did it without reverse lens mount

Experiment I:

Gargamel | Normal lens at focal length 55mm maximum closest Gargamel | Same lens setting but reversed and closed up

Experiment II:

Watch | Normal setting 55mm Watch | Reverse Lens

March 25, 2012
Having Fun with Custom BOKEH

Bokeh is originally a Japanese word meaning ‘blur’ or ‘haze’ (Wikipedia). So, in photography, bokeh is used when you take a photo with a very shallow focus (big aperture), the area that are out of focus will be blurry. Bokeh is mostly used for night photography where the light is out of focus and blurry and give it a bit of artistic feeling on it. Recently, I made an experiment with custom bokeh shapes with Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.

How?

Basically, all we need to do is just covering the lens with shaped filter in black. I use lens cup with whole on it and put my custom shaped filter behind it: simple and save place in your camera bag. Another way is you could make a filter that you can put on top of your lens like most tutorial on youtube do. Or you can buy factory made custom bokeh filters, neatness guarantee but at the moment, I’m showing you my DIY filters.

Here are what I did, would be more shopisticated when the lights are more colorful and make it in video with movements. Will wait til the wet season gone and can not wait for Mindil Beach opening or Territory Day with lots of fireworks:) :

Here are the results:

Bokeh No filter

Bokeh with broken heart shaped filter

Bokeh with question mark shaped filter

Bokeh with positive shaped filter

Bokeh with star shaped filter

And this is what the filter looks like:

DIY Cutom Bokeh Filter

March 11, 2012
Lytro Light Field Camera

Have you ever been disappointed by your camera, or more to yourself for taking a rare opportunity photo but out of focus? I have :D. No software can fix that problem at the moment until recently new invention came up with LYTRO.

Meant to shot me,not the bridge :D. It will be different story if it was shot with Lytro.

Its a light field camera that can be used by anyone and no need to worry about the focus. Simple words, shoot now focus later. They just started shipping the new product to their first buyers on 29 February 2012. This brilliant invention captures a photo with a large depth of focus so with only using their software, we can choose or change the focus as we please. By uploading to their gallery, we can even play around with the focus by clicking the point where you want it to be focused. I can imagine now the problem like my picture above will be gone soon with DSLRs applying this technology.

Lytro Light Field Camera

Here are some photos that you can play around with the focus. The picture is not live in this blog because wordpress.com doesn’t allow iframe embedding, but if you click below images and go to the link, you can play around with it and see what I mean.

Click image to see live photo

Click image to see and play around with focus. Wait until its fully loaded

Click to see and play around with focus.

Click images to see Lytro camera result.

March 4, 2012
Trip 2012 | New Zealand and Sydney

First time in NZ and we traveled around in South Island driving from Christchurch toward North and stayed overnight or two in Kaikoura, Nelson, Hikitika, Queenstown, Lake Tekapo and back to Christchurch before flying to Sydney. All footages and photos taken by Irawan during trip February 2012.

Thoughts come clearly while one walks. ~Thomas Mann

February 25, 2012