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)

Life, Lemons, Lights, and Lenses

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I was scratting round for a subject this evening, and eventually landed on this lemon.
Being edible, I suppose it's at least loosely in my snackro category.
This one's a stack of 33 frames.

Still Kaputt, But Closer

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I smell of spray paint. My house smells of spray paint. My entire neighbourhood probably smells of spray paint.
But progress has been made, and I took a photo.
What an unusually productive evening.

This one's a focus stack at 4.5x magnification

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.

More Elf Cups

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Today was a rather busy day, and I ended up spending the quite a chunk of the evening helping my colleague de-wonkify his new car's headlight and bumper.

This one's a backup from my trip to the woods a few weeks ago.
It's a stack of 11 frames.

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

Scarlet Elf Cup

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We had a lovely day today, sunny and warm for the time of year.
I went for a walk in the woods with my parents, and we spotted lots of these Scarlet Elf Cup fungi.
This one's a stack of 10 photos. I manually incremented the focus between shots.

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.

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.

First Snowdrops

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I went for a walk with my parents this afternoon, and we spotted this group of snowdrops under a hedge.
I think this may be the earliest I've seen them - I've just looked back at the last couple of years, and it looks like both were February.

This one's a stack of 5 shots, I had the camera on a mini tripod and just manually moved the focus ring between shots.

Gingernut

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First working day of the year, and I ended up doing about an hour and a half over. Silly boy.
Despite that, I actually managed to make real food with actual vegetables tonight. Astonishing.

This pair of photos are 3x macro shots, stacks of 62 and 77 frames respectively.

One more after the jump.

Hope Springs Eternal

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This is a tiny bit of new growth that has appeared in the last few days on a small rose plant that I thought was completely dead.
It very nearly got binned last week, but I thought I'd give it a couple more weeks on the off chance. That appears to have paid off.
This one's a stack of 17 shots at 1.5x magnification.

Whirring Miniature

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A macro shot of a little gearbox that (along with a bag of other bits) has been consuming rather a lot of my time this week.
We managed to reduce one of them to a small pile of dust on an endurance test last night, so I spent several hours this afternoon working on some improvements - Let's hope we can treat this one better!

The Correct Ratio

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(Of chocolate to biscuit, in case you were wondering)
Another snackro. The delight of doing these is that you get a tasty treat when you're done.
I find it interesting that you can see a bit of machining chatter, or perhaps more likely CNC stepover marks from the mould on the internal cone shape. I suppose they don't worry about achieving a nice finish in the chocolate mould machining world. How dissipated. Perhaps they are too busy "quality controlling" the final merchandise...
This one's a stack of 41 frames.

Quality Street

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A present from my in-laws subjected to the snackro treatment.
This one's a focus stack of 52 shots.
Ideally, I'd have either found a nice shiny example of this chocolate, or somehow polished it up to remove the marks from the surfaces.

Peppercorns

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The week has gone to pot by Tuesday afternoon...
Not the best shot, but I'm knackered, and the other one I did was worse. I think I've got some minor vibration issues coming from the focus rail with the setup in this orientation.

Pop!

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Continuing my occasional theme of macro photos of snacks with this 1x macro of a piece of popcorn (or my brain, I can't be completely sure these days 🤯)
Snackro photography, you might say.
This one's a focus stack of 39 shots.

Take A Bite

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I actually set up a shot this evening.
I used actual effort, and everything!

My parents brought me this apple back from a trip to Barnsdale Gardens, where I got married. It's a nice apple, and it's a nice reminder of the best day of my life.