Another wild and weird ultra-macro. It's the tip of an anther of a flower on one of Mrs L's African Violets (the same flower as yesterday's stigma). Magnification at sensor about 10x (possibly more). The yellow background is another (OOF) anther. A stack of 90 shots. It won't win prizes for sharpness or other measurable parameters, but I still rather like it.

Taken with the same kit as yesterday's stigma - a Q-S1 attached to Pentax Auto Bellows A with a Laowa 25mm 2.5-5x macro (at 2.5x) on the other end. Back of the bellows moved to shift focus. Again, its pushing to the limits the lens, sensor and the stability of my macro setup. And 90 tiny, manual steps is pushing to the limit my ability to not move, not breath and not scratch my nose! Automation was looking strangely attractive (but not the price...).

Thoughts, comments welcome as usual.




Steve

Nice stuff ... as long as it's you and not me out in the dark cold for 3 hours .

Interesting that successive posts last night were on the scales of fractions of a mm (my stigma macro) and thousands of light years (distance between stars in Orion's belt). If my maths is correst, that's a difference of about 20 orders of magnitude i.e. 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 between the macro and the astro. Stupendous!

Steve

Well, they are according to an article on the BBC website link. It's an interesting read. Apparently young people have taken a liking to 'vintage' digital cameras. Some quotes:
- "with every smartphone you buy, you can't take a bad shot almost."
- "With older cameras you have to work with them a bit more, to get a good photo or to get the most out of them."
- "I get folk asking me, 'where do you edit these photos, are they edited?'. And I always say these are never edited and I want to show exactly how they've come out on every camera."

Wait a bit longer and they'll discover DSLRs ... and optical viewfinders .

Steve

A wild and weird experiment with extreme macro. It's the stigma of a flower on one of Mrs L's African Violets.

Stack of 20 images taken with a Q-S1 attached to Pentax Auto Bellows A with a Laowa 25mm 2.5-5x macro (at 2.5x) on the other end. Back of the bellows moved to shift focus. Magnification at the sensor is probably about 10x, perhaps a bit more, based on sensor size and a Mk 1 eyeball guestimate of the dimension of the stigma (comparison with mm markings on a ruler :shock. It's pushing the lens, sensor and the stability of my macro setup to the limits. But what the heck, it was fun. And the result, to my eyes, has a strange beauty - your view may differ!

Thoughts, comments etc. welcome as usual.




Steve

Another lovely and striking snow set. Well spotted, well executed.

Snow and sand dunes - much the same sort of thing if the snow is powdery, just different materials. Not wishful thinking at all.

Steve

Beautiful, simple, effective. And snow scenes that are not variations on a cliche.

Do you still have snow, or is this catching up from a while ago?

Steve

... it probably is a duck, even if it doesn't quack. Unless it's a cormorant.

Here are a few of the more interesting shots of ducks (and cormorant) from my trip to RSPB Ham Wall a week ago. There were also plenty of the 'here's a swimming widgeon' type of photo, but who wants to see yet another standard duck picture - unless you're into that sort of thing of course.

All with K3 + DA300mm + F 1.7x adapter.

1. Making waves



2. Who needs a head?



3. At last, one posed for the camera...



4. Alone in the big, bad, cold world



5. Keeping the ice hole open



6. Lord of all he (or she) surveys



Steve

And if you want to see pictures of Coker's Miraculous Macro Apparatus, he posted some in the 'Penny macro contest - revisited' thread, posted 15/02/2021 at 22.57 link . That thread is a goldmine of strange and wonderful ways to get big pictures of tiny things - and it's still open for new contributions .

Steve

If the auction place in the East Midlands is John Pye Technical, they are the authorised Pentax service and repair people for the UK. I've never used them myself (nor any other camera repair company for that matter) but others on this forum have and have been satisfied with what they did.

You say that the lens is less than 2 years old. It might therefore still be under warranty, depending on where you bought it. Worth checking!

Steve

Probably due to a mixture of my (in)ability to get focus spot on, my skills (or not) in post-processing and the 1.4 TC shot (the first) being a bigger crop than the others. I haven't done a forensic, pixel-level comparison of the 1.4x and 1.7x but from normal viewing of images straight from camera I really can't tell the difference.

Steve