[Aki Korhonen] wanted to tighten up his macro photography setup. He already had the camera for the job, but wanted a fully adjustable target platform that he could easily light. What he came up with is a jig to hold the camera and fine tune the subject of each photo. It uses a frame with a piece of glass whose distance from the lens is adjusted by turning a knob. Below the glass a reflective surface redirects light from an LED flashlight up through the platform, lighting the snowflakes he’s shooting. A fixed LED source is in the plans for the next rendition.
Take a look at the overview of his setup in the quick clip after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKtiY1gp-DI&w=470]
[via Hackaday Pool]
Isn’t a LED light bad for photography? Cause of the colors…
LEDs aren’t great if you’re looking for accurate full-spectrum color reproduction. You see this sometimes if you try to take photos at a concert lit by LED pars–you’ll get really strange gradients under some colors. I don’t think it would matter for snowflakes.
It’d be cool (and easy) to do some dark-field illumination with this, too!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_field_microscopy
Having the Camera on a separate support would help minimize the shaking of the thing being photographed. not sure how much better quality of a picture it would be though.
I probably wouldn’t use LEDs for this.
I’d probably use a good old fashioned incandescent lol. Ah, but this issue would be the heat generated melting the snow flakes. Hmm maybe for this specifically LEDs are ok.
LEDs emit a lot less IR than incandescents – you wouldn’t want to melt your subject, now would you?
While building that he should also gone with a better more stable stand for it I can’t but help feel, that’s not a cheap camera from the looks of it and the length of the setup is really too much.
Even when he doesn’t have a cat :)
Why is the picture labeled SAMSUNG?
oooh was the torch from price angels? I love that site!
Yes, I wouldn’t use LED lights in other types of photography but in this case it’s the easiest option because I just want to get the outline of the flakes visible by backlighting it so colors won’t matter. And they won’t melt the flakes :)
loneboat: thanks, I’ll have to give that technique a try, might look cool.
alan, Whatnot: there are some support braces coming to the stand. The main reason I built it as a single contraption was that I just wanted an easy setup that I can just put out when there is a suitable weather to get some photos (freezing enough and some fresh snow coming down).
Pa55w0rD: the photo is taken with my Samsung phone and it seems to put “SAMSUNG” to the caption part of the jpg metadata and the hackaday CMS takes it from there automatically, I guess.
ahh, that explains that