About the Image(s)

In this shot I wanted to keep with the concept that this study group was to focus upon the concept of capturing images of small subjects. So here I captured this image of these small (4 cm high, 2 cm wide) bottles containing Citrine (yellow), Lapis (blue) and Coral (red) minerals.

For this specific shot I decided to use a flash as the light source. By using a flash, with a fast shutter speed (1/200 sec or so), the only light on the subject is from the flash (at this shutter speed, were the flash not to fire, the entire shot would be black). This allows me to control the light on the subjects without trying to control ambient light. It also allows the background to quickly fade to black as the inverse square rule of light means that in very short distances, the light fades away and the background quickly fades to black. In this image the subjects were placed on black glass (for the reflections) but no black background was used. The falloff of light results in the dark black background. This is a really useful technique when there are a lot of distractions behind your macro subject, and one I found useful when I was shooting Orchids at a flower show when I could not move or arrange the subjects which were in a very busy setting.

Here I used my tripod mounted Canon R5 Mark II with a RF 100 mm f/2.8 macro lens (1/200 sec, f/16, ISO 160) to collect this single shot. Note that one could have collected a focus stack of images as well, with the flash firing for each focus slice. One does need to allow sufficient time between shots for the flash to recharge though
This single image was subsequently edited from the starting image (see insert) in Photoshop to straighten the subjects, remove most of the glare spots and to generally clean up the presentation.

There is a simplicity to this dramatic image that I liked. Let me know what you all think.