Chillies

I have been growing a few chilli plants this year and have had a decent crop of fruit. It seemed a good excuse for a little tabletop photography.

 

Pomegranates

With all of the dull weather in recent weeks, I have been playing around with some tabletop still life photography.  This involves a lot of gathering props, setting up shots and being disappointed by the results.  I was sort of happy with these simple shots, until this week's CCC excellent talk from Polina Plotnikova, which showed me what really good still life should look like.  The key points seemed to be pre-visualise better and think bigger.  Oh well, more to do. 

Frozen Flowers

There has been a camera club project for January on the theme of 'frozen'.  One suggestion was taking photos of frozen flowers.  I gave this a go during Lockdown 1, but didn't post the images back then as I wasn't that happy with them.  But, for the sake of club spirit, and because the blog has been a little sparse lately, here are some of the better ones.  I do plan give this another go sometime soon.  Hopefully next time I can get less bubbles in the ice.

Droplet Macro

One of the great things about Cambridge Camera Club is the Special Interest Groups, which meet outside of the regular club nights.  Amongst these is a monthly workshop of practical techniques, held on the first Wednesday of the month.  Sadly, due to work, Wednesdays aren't a good night for me to get to Cambridge, so this month's meeting was the first one I attended all season.  The theme this month was macro photography.  It was an opportunity to for those who had never tried taking macro shots to give it a go with borrowed equipment and for those with more experience to practice trickier techniques, such as focus stacking.

I had a try at shooting liquid droplets.  One of the other Paul's in the club had brought his table top droplet set-up.  A Heath Robinson looking affair, consisting of a squash bottle, part of a medical drip, stands and string.  It was very effective.  The drip tube allowed drops of one liquid (blackcurrant squash) to fall into a wine glass of another (milk) with a regular consistency.  The whole thing was backlit with off-camera flash, coloured with a gel insert and diffused by tracing paper held with a picture frame.

This kind of photography has more misses than hits, but the regularity of the dripping meant that I did get several shots timed about right.  It's definitely something I want to try again, and I will have to built my own set-up.