Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, slightly cropped — 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2000 — image data
Beauty in the Details
it's not much from afar, but pretty nifty when you view the full-resolution version
Here are some more frost patterns from arctic Ohio, following up from the one I posted the other day. It was -10°F (-23°C) with strong biting wind when I took these, by hand, outside in the wind, up hill both ways. According to the image data, I lasted two minutes 10 seconds before I couldn't stand the pain in my fingers any more and gave up: considering that I had heavy insulated gloves, it's a testament to either just how very cold it was, or how very wimpy I am. Probably both.
Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2000 — image data
All Roads Lead Home
( sappy, I know, but I wanted to have some label with which the photo can be referenced )
I tried a variety of processing on these to mix things up. They're all essentially monochromatic, except something behind the window sometimes showed up as a brown splotch in the background, so I turned those to black & white, and while I was at it I used Lightroom's half-tone feature to make the “white” (of “black & white”) on some of them (such as the one leading this post) slightly blue.
On the other hand, the next shot is shown in all its full-color glory...
Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, heavily cropped — 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2000 — image data
Parallels
I really need to figure out some kind of jig or brace so that I can use my favorite macro lens handheld in the field, but with more stability than just holding the lens freehand.
I'm pretty steady with the camera, but when these photo were taken — maximum aperture at maximum magnification — the depth of field was thinner than the ice crystals I was photographing. That made it extremely difficult to hit focus in the first place, but even worse, any slight off-axis tip would mean that only part of the image could possibly be in focus if at all.
That's why some of these shots are pretty aggressive crops; even if the frost pattern is interesting, the photo is not interesting if half of it is out of focus, so in some cases I cropped out a lot. In the shot above, 60% of the original is cropped away. The photo below has 55% of its original cropped away.
Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, heavily cropped — 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2000 — image data
Evergreens on a Slope
When my fingers couldn't take the cold any more, I did take the trouble to step back and get a shot to show the context....
There were other windows, each with completely different kinds of frost patterns. After warming up my hands, I went out again with the camera for a short while, and repeated the cycle (so probably this is a “to-be-continued” kind of post).