With spring taking its time arriving, I thought I'd coax it along with some close up pictures of flowers in bloom.  I've been wanting to use the wonderful 30th anniversary present Amy got me for some serious macro photography and flowers are a perfect subject for doing so.  I mentioned the gift in my post on jewelry photography.   The Nikon R1 Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System coupled with the AF-S VR Micro-Nikko 105mm f/2.8 lens is a wonderful setup for macro photography with controlled lighting.

When Amy came home from Wegmans with a bouquet of flowers and placed them in the foyer outside my study I couldn't resist getting the camera, tripod and new flash system out for a trial run.  I set the flashes on the front of my lens with the provided ring adapter and positioned the two flash heads at the 3:00 and 9:00 positions.  The flashes can be placed anywhere around the rim of the ring at one of 24 locations and the angle of the head of each flash can also be controlled.

The Nikon wireless flash system (Creative Lighting System or CLS) supports i-TTL metering, which essentially means the output power of the flashes is controlled by the exposure system of the camera and adjusted as the picture is being taken.  I took all the pictures shared this week using this setting with both flashes contributing equally to the exposure.  I chose to do this in order to have as uniform a lighting result as I could obtain.  I could have varied the output of each flash individually and produced stronger light from one side over the other resulting in more prominent shadows.  I did not want that with this setup so I kept the output equal on each flash unit.

A couple of the pictures posted are the result of focus stacking that I've mentioned in previous posts.  The two that I ended up liking the most, however, where the ones that focused on the stamens of the flower with the flower petals out of focus in the background.  As usual, I can narrow my choices down to a couple and often struggle with deciding which is better.  The left edge of the picture chosen is less distracting than on the alternative shared here and makes it a more pleasing shot in the end.

I hope you enjoy this week's post and lets all hope it entices spring to get here soon.

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On Saturday Amy and I visited the Genesee Country Village & Museum for their maple sugar festival and pancake breakfast.  After filling up on pancakes smothered in delicious warm maple syrup we took the self guided tour through the sugar bush and travelled back through time to see how gathering and processing maple syrup has changed over the years.

Multiple taps and tubing used to route sap to a collection point.

One thing that has remained constant is the trees themselves and one of the improvements provided by modern techniques is the reduction in damage done to the trees during the tapping process.  In days gone by, the tapping would begin by drilling a 1/2 inch or larger hole into the tree and then pounding in the metal tap.  Today they use a 1/4 inch hole and plastic taps and tubing to gather sap from multiple trees and pipe it to a larger, garbage bin sized collection bucket.  In some cases the farmer will run the tubing all the way to the sugar barn where the sap is boiled down to make the syrup, greatly reducing the amount of labor necessary to gather the sap.

Sap gathering as I remember it.

As we walked along the maple history trail we travelled back in time and our next stop brought us to a site depicting how the process was done in the early 1900's.  This is where you see metal buckets hanging on the trees catching sap.  Unlike modern day farmers with their sap plumbing, the farmers of this era had to keep up with emptying the sap buckets or run the risk of losing some of the valuable fluid as the bucket fills and overflows.

Setup for boiling down sap after it is gathered from the trees

The setup shown in the photo of a large stone walled fire place is indicative of the setups used during this era of syrup making.  The farmer would likely have multiple setups like this and would travel from one to the next in a big circular trail.  On his way to the next location, he would gather the sap from the trees.  Once at the fire pit location, he would use a wooden trough to ease the new sap into the boiling trays, stoke the fires and move on to the next site.

Volunteer demonstrates sugar mold carving.

The final era of maple syrup making that we visited was the mid-1800s and earlier. In this era it wasn't maple syrup they were after, it was the pure maple sugar.  The lack of refrigeration made keeping syrup difficult and it turns out that molded bricks of maple sugar would last and last and became a staple in the cooking of the time.  Farmers would setup a sugar camp among the groves of maple trees.  These groves of maples were often referred to as the sugarbush.  Here the women would setup a station of large pots to boil the sap down in stages while the men gathered the sap and transported it to the camp.  They would use the consistency of the sap as it boiled down to judge when it was ready to move on to the next stage of the process (see this weeks main photo above).

Wooden tap drips sap into hollowed out log.

I would classify this weeks photographs as documentary style pictures and as such I wanted to try and create a look for old time scenes that I could apply to the pictures.  At the end of the blog are two other renderings of this week's main photo, the original unprocessed shot and a harsher attempt to set the photo in its intended time frame.

Close-up of wooden tap made from pine.

I've often wanted to create a pseudo sepia look that carried a hint of color with it and this weeks picture and some of the companion shots have been processed to get that look.  Let me know what you think of this weeks picture and how I chose to process it vs the two other renditions below.

Unprocessed original color image

Monochrome sepia processing for an old time look

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For math geeky families like mine, yesterday was a day to celebrate, even more so if you love pie.  According to the pi day wiki page, in 2009 the U. S. House of Representatives declared March 14th to be National Pi Day and now geeks around the country and likely around the world celebrated yesterday, March 14, 2015, or better written as 3/14/15 (3.1415) and, if we pay close attention, in the morning at 9:26:53 (as our awesome t-shirts show) you get pi to 9 decimal places (3.141592653).

I took our group shot in my makeshift basement studio without a lot of prep work for lighting.  I enjoy the look of a white backdrop shot but to do it well you need to have the subjects far enough from the backdrop to prevent the light used to wash out the back from falling on the subject.  My basement ceiling isn't high enough to allow this so I do my best with makeshift shields to prevent the light from spilling on the subject.  As it was this shot needed some cleanup in photoshop to help separate the lovely models from the background.  Of course, had I had more willing models I may have been able to tweak things more while taking the shot but as it was Amy quipped, "Gee, at the rate we're going, it will be tau day by the time you get this picture taken".

Of course, as wonderful a number as pi is, it only gets better when you enjoy it with some homemade fruit pie and that only gets better with a scoop or two of vanilla bean ice cream on top.  Amy made a wonderful wild berry pie that we enjoyed as we celebrated the extra special pi day of 2015.

For some interesting facts about pi, checkout this link.

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Amy and I joined our friends, Rick and Ellen Morningstar, on a visit to the Sibley building in downtown Rochester to check out an incredible display of balloon art coined Airigami.  This year's balloon manor exhibit depicts an underwater ocean scene where a giant pirate octopus is protecting its domain from a couple rival pirates from the surface.

In one of the octopus' arms is the key to a treasure chest sitting on the ocean floor far below.  Meanwhile he attempts to sink the pirate ship above by pulling on the anchor chain.  The entire balloon sculpture is over 5 stories tall and made up of over 40,000 balloons.

The scene was overwhelming and proved to be a challenge to photograph in such a way as to both give a sense for the scale of the display as well as the level of detail.  No one picture could show the entire thing and do it justice so I decided to share several shots that would convey the level of detail put into the display and the techniques by which the artists achieved the overall look.

I decided to feature the octopus shot as my lead primarily because I viewed him as the centerpiece of the display as well as the center of the chaos that it depicts.  In order to help the octopus stand out in this picture, I used photoshop to add a lens blur to the surrounding background to reduce the distraction and allow the viewer to focus on the octopus.

The display shows the relative calm of things on the ocean floor where starfish, crabs and various other sea creatures go about their business.  The surface of the ocean is another story altogether.  There are two pirates that have recently abandoned ship and are attempting to get away in a dingy as one rows and the other appears to yell for him to row faster.

Their dog is also on board the dingy and seems to be enjoying the whole adventure.  Things are looking so bad for the pirate ship that even the rats are abandoning ship and grabbing whatever floatation aids they can before going overboard.  One of my favorite parts of the sculpture was the poor rat using a life ring to escape the sinking vessel and is about to have a huge wave break over him.

The scene contained mermaids and crabs guarding the treasure chest, a hammer head shark circling the waters hoping for something tasty to drop in and a swordfish swimming nearby.  Everything from the figure head of the ship to the eyebrows of the pirate begging for his mate to row faster were exquisitely detailed.

Discovering these attentions to detail as one took in the scene was part of what made this excursion fun and unique.

I want to thank Rick and Ellen for inviting us along and treating us to lunch afterwards.  We had a great time.  For more pictures from the balloon manor visit you can visit my flickr album here.

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Like a lot of things in photography, lighting jewelry or any small item for a nice photograph isn't as easy as it looks.  For this week's post I wanted a nice picture of the Pandora charm set that I got Amy for our 30th wedding anniversary.  As you may know from my post a couple weeks ago, we celebrated this special occasion with a trip to Disney World and that led to the choice of charms for her gift.

3 speedlight flashes with main light in front.

I recently watched a video course on Lynda.com that was taught by a person that photographs jewelry for a living and I applied what I learned to this week's photo shoot.

The setup with 3 speedlight wireless flashes.

Before jumping into the setup that produced this week's marquee shot, I thought I would try a setup that I originally thought would work.  My anniversary gift from Amy was a very nice flash system from Nikon, the R1 wireless close-up speedlight system.  Although these flash units are designed to mount to the front of a macro lens, the also come with stands that allow them to be placed in the scene for more lighting options.  I also brought in my Nikon SB900 speedlight, giving me a total of 3 flashes to try and uniformly light the scene.

3 speedlights with the main light up and behind the subject.

I tried controlling the relative power output of the 3 flashes, something Nikon's wireless flash system allows you to do from controls on your camera.  I also tried different shots with the main light in front casting its shadow to the back of the necklace and with the flash in back casting the shadows forward.  Although these shots all looked pretty good, the shadows cast by the strobes were just too distracting.

Homemade light box for lighting the necklace.

It was time to set things up as described in the tutorial I watched.  This type of close-up photography where the desire is a diffuse soft light really requires a light box to achieve the required lighting.  One of the neat things about the tutorial was instructions on how to make a simple light box from a sheet of white foam core poster board obtained from a local art store.  With the makeshift light box complete, the scene was then illuminated with a single flash fired through the hole in the side covered with 4 layers of tracing paper to soften the light as much as possible.  Once the diffuse light enters the chamber of the light box it bounces off the white walls and top producing very uniform lighting and extremely soft shadows.  The effect is quite amazing and makes the resulting image much more pleasing.

College class ring from UMO class of 1984.

While I had the setup in place I decided to photograph a couple of other items.  First was my college class ring that my mother gave me as a graduation gift when I graduated from The University of Maine in 1984.  The ring has seen a lot of wear from a lot of wear and that is picked up with this extreme close-up.  The rich color of the gold also stands out.

Pearl from Japan region of Epcot.

The other item I photographed was the pearl pendant that Amy picked up while we were in Disney World.  The pearl came from the Japan section of Epcot and was harvested from an oyster that Amy selected.  The show put on as part of the harvesting of the pearl adds to the fun of the experience (see video below) and provided Amy with a unique souvenir for our trip.  After the pearl is removed and cleaned you have the option of getting it mounted while you wait.  Amy chose a nice silver  pendant that would show off the pearl.  For this photo I chose to back it with black velvet to accentuate the silver and the pearl.

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