Dragonflies!
So, when I had a little break between classes, I wandered out to the turtle pond on campus and shot some dragonflies, and a damselfly that wandered by. :)
zimfusion wants me to go with her to the desert on Sunday and teach her some photography stuffs, so I figure I'll pontificate here for a bit about how this whole closeup business works. :P
Closeup photography is neat, since you get to see stuff you can't see with the naked eye. It's also cheap to do. My camera is essentially an overgrown point-and-shoot, and the people designing such things save money by using a really tiny sensor; mine's 4% the area of a 35mm film frame. It's cheaper to manufacture small sensors, of course, and it also means you can use smaller lenses to deliver light to them which are cheaper to manufacture.
This means that it doesn't cope so well with low light (since it doesn't collect that much light)... but it also means that you have tons and tons of depth of field. Since macrophotography is a continuous struggle to get more depth of field, having a tiny sensor is an advantage!
It turns out the challenge of dealing with really tiny stuff is just as easy as using the highest zoom setting on the camera (which tends to be "farsighted"; it can't focus close) and then slapping reading glasses on the camera to "correct" the farsightedness.
Okay, enough blubbering about physics;
zimfusion wants me to go with her to the desert on Sunday and teach her some photography stuffs, so I figure I'll pontificate here for a bit about how this whole closeup business works. :P
Closeup photography is neat, since you get to see stuff you can't see with the naked eye. It's also cheap to do. My camera is essentially an overgrown point-and-shoot, and the people designing such things save money by using a really tiny sensor; mine's 4% the area of a 35mm film frame. It's cheaper to manufacture small sensors, of course, and it also means you can use smaller lenses to deliver light to them which are cheaper to manufacture.
This means that it doesn't cope so well with low light (since it doesn't collect that much light)... but it also means that you have tons and tons of depth of field. Since macrophotography is a continuous struggle to get more depth of field, having a tiny sensor is an advantage!
It turns out the challenge of dealing with really tiny stuff is just as easy as using the highest zoom setting on the camera (which tends to be "farsighted"; it can't focus close) and then slapping reading glasses on the camera to "correct" the farsightedness.
Okay, enough blubbering about physics;