Macro fun with Johannes

Johannes came over and we swapped lenses back. (We had traded a couple weeks earlier.) Since I had just gotten my extension tubes and he was giving me back my 50mm reversing lens, and since there was a skeeter eater buzzing in the window, we decided to take some pictures.

We started out with just some of the extension tubes; this was maybe the 12mm or 20mm tube.

I think this was a mosquito flying around at the same window, but the mosquito eater wouldn’t eat it.

See, this makes me think that the picture we found on Wikipedia that is similar to this one underwent some serious colorizing post-processing.

“if, indeed, that is your real name…”

I think we added a few more extension tubes; I think this might have been all three (for a total of 68mm). I highly recommend those Kenko tubes, by the way.

So, my question: what the hell are those little pods off of his abdomen??

Vanessa says they are halteres.

It’s the 30-inch Dell. The sub-pixels look like sausages!

So we decided to put the 50mm lens reversed on the tubes, for something like 2.3x macro (which is something like 50-100x magnification when you see the full-sized image on your monitor).

This was some teeny-tiny dead fly on the window sill. Fruit fly? I have no idea. I love the little feathery antennae, though!

This is the body of the skeeter eater with the 3 tubes and the 50mm reversed. Damn. And these were mostly-hand-held shots (I mean, not a tripod), and not like the 13-second exposures we were using with the pringles-can-extension-tube. All things considered, these came out really well!

Ok, I am grossed out. I’ve been eaten by squeeters all summer. Ten minutes outside and they start flocking. Sara Ellen isn’t bothered at all. I don’t even remember seeing any there.

When we were in Valencia, C got about 17 mosquito bites over the course of three nights and Ruby got one or two… it always seems like they prefer some people over others. Mysterious! And yes, gross.

Again of Katy’s big monitor. These were yellow letters, so of course you see red sausages, green sausages, and no blue sausages.

We were looking at the first sausage-pixel picture, and Johannes took this picture of one of those pixels. (So… does that make sense? It’s a picture of the pixels in a picture of pixels.)

After seeing the sausages, we decided to look at other monitors. The OLPC, in particular, has a really weird screen with color and b/w settings.

I was surprised to see that you can make out the colors at this magnification; to the naked eye, this was all just shades of grey.

Finally, a picture of Katy’s Kindle. It only has b/w mode, and no backlight at all. Very high resolution. What I didn’t really notice, though, are all those tiny dots. I wonder of those are intentional? Barely visible to the naked eye, they add a sort of texture to the image.