In that article, it said to take your existing lens off your camera, turn it around so it’s backwards, then hold it close against your camera body’s lens mount, and take photos. It wasn’t quite that easy for me.

I quickly discovered that it wasn’t going to work. I had no way to change the aperture, which was fully closed when it was off the camera body. Ah well.

Luckily, I had old lenses still kicking around from the days when I still shot using film with my Minolta X7A. I still have the X7A and the lenses & flash, just haven’t used them since I arrived in Sri Lanka, which is when I moved over to a digital compact camera due to the high cost of developing & printing film.

So I pull out my 28mm f2.8, set the aperture to wide open, and start experimenting. Ah, finally, all is not completely black.

So I take a picture of my lens cap. Because, yes, I’m a geek. Or  a dork. Whichever is most applicable in these circumstances. And then I take a photo of a bobbin of thread as my next experiment, cranking the ISO way up because the lighting in my dining room is not conducive to well-lit photography.

Then I head outside, where all the flowers and pretty things reside. I even spotted what looked similar to a dragon fly but with bright red wings. Alas, the regular lens was inside and there was no way to get close enough before it flew off.

Ah well.

This is where it got fun.

Turns out, I had to have the front of lens (or the back of the lens, depending on the semantics) within an inch or two of whatever I was photographing if I wanted anything in focus. Add to that that we pretty much always have a slight breeze, and at that close a proximity, whatever I tried focusing on would be in focus out of focus in focus out of focus in focus out of focus in a matter of milliseconds. Because, yes, my depth of field was *that* shallow. And I had to play around with ISO and shutter speed since the camera couldn’t figure this out automatically – it actually refused to take any pictures at all unless I was in manual mode. Guess that’s what happens when you don’t have a lens attached.

I ended up deleting 48 of the 81 photos I took on general principles.

Fahim: What are those? Clouds?
Me: Uh, no. That’s a jasmine flower.

Yeah.

But some turned out pretty good. And a few turned out looking like weird abstracts.

Next time, I play with the aperture a bit closed down to see how much of an increase in depth of field I can get while still being able to take reasonable photos. And playing with my other two manual lenses – a 28-70 and a 70-300 – and see what those will do for me.

I played with colour and light, and upped the black intensity in combination with getting as close as I could to the palm leaf.

I’ve mentioned before that we have a few croton plants in our garden. I love them – they’re colourful and interesting to look at, methinks, and even lovelier after a good rain.

I hope you enjoy looking at my crotons as much as I have.

This is a papaya leaf from the volunteer papaya tree growing in our front yard. We still don’t know whether it’s a boy plant, a girl plant, or a bisexual/hermaphrodite plant.

I’ve had a LOT of chameleon visitors lately. Is it something in the water? Some kind of karma? A hint that I need to keep taking photos of them until I get it right? Did they lay eggs somewhere in our garden?

A few days ago, I wrote about a water drop experiment and showed the resulting images. If you’re interested in playing with water drop photography, read this link – it’ll explain one way it can be done. Well, no, at least a couple or three given the subsequent contributions in the thread…

Since my images turned out rather more, ah, abstract as opposed to nice and crisp, I redid the experiment. This time, I used green food colouring for kicks and giggles.

These are some of my results.

Today’s photo is of the front door of our house.

I ran across a weekly themed photographic challenge over at Spain Daily through my friend Lynn Rutz’s photoblog, and I’m hoping they’ll let me play. This week’s theme is Front Door. Hence… my front door…

I know, I know – not a barbie. But every time I try to think “Contortionist Squirrel”, it comes out as “Contortionist Barbie”. Sue me.

Yup, squirrels hang out a lot around our house. They hang a lot around the entire neighborhood. Since they’re fun to watch, I tend to not mind. And since they don’t cause any bad behavior as long as they don’t come inside – which they haven’t with this house *knocks on wood* – I’m pretty much fine with them.

This one, today, was climbing all over the tree, upside down, sideways, just having a good ol’ time. So naturally, I photographed him.

This is some of the loose change that’s been hanging around.

We have coins from Canada, the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka (of course), and who knows where else. It just… finds its way here…

Nikon D90, 105mm focal length, 1/125 sec at f/5.6, ISO 3200, no flash

There’s a tutorial over at Digital Photography School, which is, by the way, a cool photographic website, on water droplet photography. If you’re interested in playing with photography or looking at pretty and interesting photos, I seriously suggest you take a gander through that thread.

I didn’t do my setup the same way the guy in the thread did his. Instead of using a coloured plate below a glass dish for color and a piece of coloured paper for the background, my setup is this:

I put my cutting board over the sink, a glass pie plate on the cutting board, and added food colouring to the water in the pie plate so I wouldn’t have to worry about a nonexistent coloured plate. Seemed simpler.

I also did this underneath the tap so I could use the tap to provide the water rather than setting up something else to dribble.

I played around with the angles a bit, and ended up shooting the water droplets with the open window behind the setup. That also meant that I ended up with the jambu tree outside reflecting in the water, providing the greenish yellow colouring in the pictures.

It was difficult to get the water drops in focus – my kitchen is not very bright, much to my dismay. On the other hand, it was enough fun that this is something I’ll definitely do again. It’ll be interesting to see how future experiments end up.

My favourite is the last picture. No, none of the photos are crisp like the majority of the images in the thread I mentioned above, but I especially like the abstract feel, to me anyway, of the last picture in particular.

Nikon D90, 105mm focal length, 1/100 sec at f/5.6, ISO 3200, no flash

Nikon D90, 105mm focal length, 1/30 sec at f/5.6, ISO 3200, no flash

What do you think?