This post is going to be a bunch of random pictures that I think demonstrate something interesting or cool. The first few are just some close up nature still life shots. There are some high speed water pictures, some pictures playing with lights, a picture that shows the earth spinning, an ultra closeup of an eye, and a couple that show an interesting idea of changing zoom while taking a long exposure. I've commented on most of the individual pictures with the technique I was using/idea I was going for. All of the originals are 4000 x 3000 but blogger only allows 1600 x 1200. I still recommend clicking on the picture to see it at this size.



I really liked taking pictures of the lizard in the next 3 pictures. He was trying to hide so he was staying as still as possible. The camera is less than a foot away from him. Only the last picture is a crop.

Here it has an eye wide open



Here you can see a little bit of the front of its snout.



Click on the picture below to see the crazy details. This is cropped to actual pixels from the first picture of the lizard.



Close up of water drops on a leaf. I really like the shapes that water drops form depending on what surface they are on. I also really like the reflections. I need to play around with arranging water drops sometime.



With a shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second, you can get some pretty cool pictures of water though due to all the motion it is really hard to focus on. I took a bunch of pictures of water coming out of a spigot. This one turned out pretty cool.



Another of the water shots. In this one it is coming out at the camera.



This was shot at late twilight with a tripod. I started out zoomed in a 10x and then with a long exposure zoom out to be completely wide. This would give you straight lines. In order to get the smooth curve I rotated the tripod head while zooming out.



The camera was on a stationary tripod in the picture below. (The camera was not moving with respect to the ground at all) At 10x zoom with a 60 second exposure you can really see how the earth is spinning. I've really boosted this picture beyond where it should go in order to see more streaks. In the original you can see the colors of the different stars. I need to shoot in raw so that I can keep more information and this even after boosting would be much cleaner. I'm really tempted to see whether I can look at the distribution of path lengths in order to find what the center of rotation is and calculate the rotation rate of the earth. It will be like the old days tracking particles in Wolfgang Losert's Lab!



Long exposure taken at 10x zoom of city lights while moving the camera up and down multiple times to get so many streaks.


This is a 1 second exposure using a tripod where I start out zoomed in 10x and then zoom out completely wide. This causes perspective lines to appear where there are bright objects being photographed. This works really well on the guitar. I need to play with this in a cooler location than my classroom!




My brother's eyeball. This is not a crop. I used a cheap macro adapter and zoomed in at 10x. His eye was probably about 2 inches away from the lens. The depth of field is crazy shallow. I need to take this picture in daylight instead of indoors and I need to make sure my white balance settings are right! Still pretty cool, look at the detail on the very center of the eye.