Imprint

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4(3)

Oojimaflips, Thingamibobs, Whatdjamacallits, and Doofadums

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Some of the bits I've spent a lot of time making this week / weekend.
On a bigger, more rigid machine, these would be pretty easy bits, but on my tiny little lathe, it's more of a challenge. I'd go into more detail, but I fear most of the audience would die of boredom, so I'll leave it here!
Still, by my measurements, they're all in tolerance, with the exception of one groove, which I'll probably remake, and the lathe hasn't gone up in smoke yet, so it's all good.

Hacked Off

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As someone who meddles with cables from less than a millimetre across up to big beasties thicker than your wrist, I quite like the lack of scale here.
Niche interest though...
(About 8mm total diameter for any fellow weirdos in the audience)

Glow In The Dark

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I thought it was time to go for something other than flowers, so I gave this LED the macro treatment.

Bluebell Season Is Upon Us

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A backup photo from yesterday.

The wretched covid monster has bitten my head off again today.
Based on the timing, it seems highly probable that it came from work [rant redacted].

Beauty In Decay

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I gave this leaf skeleton a bit of macro treatment.
I think it's fascinating to see how it's decayed but left the veins behind.
3x magnification stacked shot made from 10 frames shot with my WeMacro focus rail, stacked with Helicon Focus.

Dinky Daff

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CAT5

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The innards of a bit of network cable.

I Can Smell This Photo

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I was making a coffee this afternoon, and thought it was about time for another coffee-adjacent photo.

This one's not a stack (for a change), but it was approaching the limit of what was reasonable to shoot in one frame at this magnification.

Drip, Rebelling, Momentarily

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I dug out the Miops Splash for the first time in ages tonight, and had a bit of fun with it.
We bought some lab jacks for the x-ray work we did recently. When I found them in the car boot the other night, it occurred to me that they might be a useful thing for macro work, so I've been playing with one of them with most of my setup on it. It's rather useful to be able to move the subject rather than, or at least in addition to manipulating the camera.
I'm quite tempted to buy myself at least one as a result.

Success!

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We finally got through the EMC tests we have been working on at work today, with the addition of a little widget we designed.
That's another bit of the project in the bag.
This one's a focus stack of 68 images.

Unrelated, but this is my 1250th post here.

Catkins or Microphones?

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A rather long day today, but I did manage to shoot this after I recovered a bit.

It's a focus stack of 15 shots, manually incremented

Beachballs?

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I'm in a strange, unsettled frame of mind today.

A Moment For Reconditioning

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I bought myself another 2nd-hand lens yesterday, the EF8-15mm f/4 L fisheye. I've been considering one for a long time, but they don't come up locally all that often.
While it works well, it is not in perfect condition; it looks like the protruding front element has made contact with one or two things over the years, as it has a few very fine scratches, and the weather seal was pretty well mangled, as is relatively common with used L series lenses.
The seals aren't protected when the lens is capped and stuffed in your bag, and they're made of a fairly soft silicone, so they're easily snagged and torn if you aren't careful.
The new RF series caps are a bit bigger and protect the seal, so I have contemplated either getting a few of those, although they're a rather tight fit on the EF lenses, or perhaps 3D printing an extra ring to attach to the EF caps to cover up the seal.
Fortunately, the weather seal is a fairly straightforward repair now I've found a ready source of affordable replacement seals. I've made this repair on several of my lenses now with good results.

Hopefully I'll have some wacky fisheye photos from this lens to share soon.

Examine The Fracture Surface

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I spent a bit of time today looking at the surfaces of a metal component that had fatigue fractured, and ended up taking some photos for the report. If I'd remembered to take the correct lens with me, I might even have posted one here, but alas I did not.
Therefore, you'll have to make do with this snackro of the fracture surface of a Matchmaker chocolate instead.

It's much tastier, and a lot less chewy than a lump of steel, I'll give it that much.

This one's a 3x magnification photo (plus a minor crop), and is a stack made up of 37 frames.

Nestled Drop

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I was absolutely knackered after work today. I flaked out on the sofa and woke myself up a couple of times with a particularly horrendous snore.
Predictably, now it's approaching midnight, I've perked up nicely and don't want to go to bed (as usual).

I've got a few daffodils on the go at the moment, so I thought I'd give them a spot of macro treatment. This one's a 4x magnification shot, un-stacked this time.

I 3D printed a grid for my Godox MF12 flashes the other night, and gave it a go here. It seems to work OK.
It's quite interesting working at this scale, even a small flash like the MF12 has the look a much larger light would have at a more normal scale, but you still need quite a lot of power.

Weapons-Grade Incompetence

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I've been intending to sort out a dodgy bit of diagonally-routed wiring in the house for at least a couple of years, but never managed to find a suitable combination of time and motivation until today.
As I chiselled out the badly routed wire, I found the workmanship was so much worse than I had expected - these two cables had been roughly joined by twisting them together, with a token few wraps of tape over the top, then the whole mess was cemented into the wall.
I'm very lucky the house didn't end up burning down from this sort of bodge.

I thought I'd channel the fire risk with the lighting on this shot before knuckling down and fixing the disaster.

Measured Response

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Seems an appropriate coda to the day, which was largely spent measuring things, thinking about measuring things, and talking about measuring things.
Not necessarily in that order.
And albeit to rather higher precision than the trusty steel rule can deliver.

It's very rare I use this lens without focus stacking, but today is one of those occasions.

Shrivel

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This one's a manually incremented focus stack of 13 shots.
This lens is pretty old, and didn't originally work on digital bodies, but a rather clever person from the Czech Republic came up with a neat little implant chip to upgrade these old Sigma lenses and keep them functional.
Rather pleasing, because it's a good lens.

Jelly Menace

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