Olloclip Macro 3-in-1

The Olloclip Macro 3-in-1 lens kit is something that Santa gave me this year.  I haven't had a lot of time to explore its capabilities, but it looks like something that I can have fun with.

Here's something that I shot with it last night:

My best guess is that this is a male Nursery web spider (Pisaurina mira), lurking on my basement wall.

The Olloclip Macro 3-in-1 comes with a clip that mounts on a bare iPhone 5s.  The clip is reversible,  sporting a 7x lens and a doubler on one side, and a 21x lens on the other side.  They give you a little cone that fits over the 21x lens so that you can quickly focus by laying the cone against your target.

The kit also comes with an extra cone, a couple of lens caps, and a little black sack in which to carry everything.

As I mentioned, the Olloclip only fits on a bare iPhone, so you need to remove your phone from any case that you're using.  For me, this was a Pelican Pro Gear Protector case, which fortunately is easily removable.  Right now, I'm going without the case, but I think that I'll be using the case again soon and will just carry the clip with me for when I'll need it.

Another feature of the Olloclip is that it covers the flash.  This isn't too big a problem, because the camera works pretty well with natural light.

Something else that I have only begun to explore is the Olloclip iPhone app, which

provides features such as a Mesh Editor, Macro Mode, Slo-Mo video, and many others. Our Photo Stabilizer Mode and Macro viewfinder will help you refine your focus to get the best shot with less effort.

I hope to be making more use of the Olloclip 3-in-1 in the coming year.

Late bloomers

The backyard flower garden held a surprise yesterday.  Despite the hard frost on Monday morning, a fair number of Marsh Gentians (Gentiana pneumonanthe) were blooming their collective hearts out on Tuesday afternoon.

These are both focus stacks, courtesy of Magic Lantern.  The flower in the upper image was much closer to the ground, so it wasn't affected by the occasional breeze.  The bottom flower was much more exposed, and I had to go through the stack several times to eliminate probably half of the layers where the flower had been blown to one side or the other. 

Forks of Cheat

Sunday, November 2^nd, turned out to be a crisp fall day with minimum cloud cover.  It was late afternoon by the time that I got to the Forks of Cheat, a place I hadn't visited for a couple of years.

By then, the sun was fairly low, casting long shadows across the field behind the Forks of Cheat Baptist church.  This shot was at 17mm, my wide-angle max.

The following shot is from the same location, but at 55mm.   It's a shame that I have a lens hood, but I seldom remember to pack it.

Crash Course

I read today that they're going to make fatter crash test dummies in the U.S. in order to keep up with  increasing obesity trends.

Not to let a stupid idea pass, I figured that it was time for another book:

 

I can't believe how much I've forgotten about using Adobe Illustrator.  It's a wonder that I could do this much.

The Long View

Looking down on Star City, W.Va..  I took this shot from behind the University Town Centre (sic), which sits atop an abandoned mine site (PDF).  That's the Monongahela River winding its way north towards Pittsburgh, where it joins the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River.  A conveyor in the middle-left transports coal directly to barges on the river.  Behind the hill is a smoke stack for the Longview coal-burning power plant.

Falling Water

No, this has nothing to do with the Frank Lloyd Wright house in southwestern Pennsylvania.  This is a small waterfall at Valley Falls State Park, east of Fairmont.

As usual, it was a clear, sunny day that turned cloudy as soon as I arrived with my camera and tripod.  I was experimenting with bracketing exposures and cranking back the density of my variable neutral density filter.  Apparently (make note of this!), the best results seem to be with the smallest aperture.  This shot was at f/18, and it took a full eight seconds.

A lot of the photos where I used the neutral density filter have noticeable "noise."  This one doesn't have much at all.  There wasn't too much exposure correction needed in the Lightroom version, either.

Swamp thing

Meet the Swamp smartweed (Polygonum hydropiperoides) growing in a hollow stump at Valley Falls park: