One week after building it, I finally had a chance to spend some quality time with Frankenlens. I started out playing with flowers and leaves from the yard but, as is usually the case, I “wandered off.”

Looking through a macro lens changes your perspective on normal objects. Under magnification our brains try to connect what we see with something within our normal frame of reference.

For me, that’s the fun of macro work. My frame of reference is largely landscape photography. When I start looking at objects on the macro level I start seeing themes and shapes.  Moving the object a quarter of an inch can radically change the perspective of the image.  It’s amazing how, once you let go of your normal analytical processes, you can spend hours looking at the same object.  Each new view shows you something that was there all along but you never noticed.

This image was made of the connector on the edge of a laptop hard drive. The brass pins are 4mm tall.  The image was cropped slightly to clean up the edges and adjust the rotation. The exposure was made on my Canon 5D, using my reversed 18-55 EF-S lens set at 55mm.  The aperture was f/22 for 3/4 of a second at ISO 800.  With this homebuilt macro lens the working distance is really small.  I was no more than 2 inches from the subject and at 18mm it gets even smaller, a little over an inch.

Cheers