Lovely, delicate - and it looks entirely convincing, unlike most IR landscapes (in my opinion, anyway...). I think you've got a good thing going with IR flowers. Let's see some more! I'm not sure that Mrs L. would agree, though, she likes colour and alstroemeria is one of her favourites (although we've never been very successful growing them ).

Do you use an IR 'light' source or just take it as it comes? Or perhaps a hairdryer to add a few highlights...?

Steve

Hmmm... I can see why you got rid of the stream of cream and its reflection, it doesn't fit. But I do like the softness of the edges of the flows and pools of cream. It hints at motion and is good foil for the static sharpness of the cake (pie? tart? ).

Steve

The last one for me, please. In particular, I like the way that the starscape transitions into the foliage of the tree at the right hand side - at first glance I thought you'd captured the clouds of interstellar dust towards the galactic centre . And the foreground in the other two is too bright for my taste.

Steve

Technically excellent and composition spot on.

The last one is my favourite. Unfortunately, the cream in the first two doesn't work for me. I think it's because it doesn't look like it has been poured on in preparation for being eaten, so what's the message? Am I missing something?

Steve

I'm drooling ... and amazed at the colour pallete in your garden.

Isn't Reaper one of the scarily hot chillies? .. .. ..

Steve

An interesting suggestion, but you presumably haven't had the pleasure of a close encounter with the lens... It is very specialised, only for ultra-macro. Depth of field is always much smaller than 1mm and the range of focus is very limited - approx 4-5cm from front of lens, not capable of focussing on anything further away. Hand-holding the lens against a tube would need to be accurate to about 1/50mm for it to have any validity and I doubt if that would be possible even with the camera mounted on my fairly solid macro rig.

Anyway, I've decided to spend a little bit of money and have ordered a cheap (£12) and very basic set of new tubes. As far as I can tell it has no levers or any other connectivity or communication between camera and lens, just bare tubes, so it should be possible to mount the lens. I'm not expecting much in the way of build quality, but it will hopefully be enough to decide whether to pursue tubes any further. If the results look good but the tubes don't seem up to regular use, there's always the option of buying an old and inexpensive but well made set and removing the obstructing lever. Frustratingly, there's a bug photographer whose website shows pretty good pictures taken with tubes attached to the Laowa which have pushed magnification to 9x. However, he uses Nikon and Olympus M4/3 cameras so presumably doesn't have to deal with an awkward lever.

Steve

Has one of those SpaceX re-usable rockets landed on your drive link ???

Steve

Thanks, appreciated.

Steve

Yes, the Laowa doesn't have a slot for the lever to go into. I did wonder about removing the lever but decided against since it's only for an experiment and Murphy's Law says that when I want to put it back I won't be able to find it or, even worse, damage the tubes while removing it.

TBH, I was really surprised that there was nothing in my box of odds and ends that would do the job. I thought that what is in there would be able to connect anything to anything else. Unfortunately not.

Steve

Thanks, an interesting suggestion. I've just tried it with the 1.4TC and it works! Goodness knows what a TC that's optimised for long lenses will do with a short focal length lens that's optimised for short distance, high magnification. There's only one way to find out, though. A whole new area for tinkering and experimenting has opened up ... .

However, interesting as it is, it isn't quite what I was looking for because of the extra glass in the TC. So has anyone any other suggestions that do not involve extra glass? And please don't suggest removing the lens elements from the beautiful, precious, oh so useful 1.4TC .

Steve