10000

Whoops. Today it happened: exposure number 10000 with my Fuji S5pro. I bought the camera in August 2008. That makes roughly 500 exposures per month (I'd be poor and starving if I'd shoot film). But I end up showing less that 10% of that to the public. Sometimes less than 5% even.

Today, I was out in the fields, following my own advice from the previous post: looking for details. After seeing photos by a fellow hobbyist on Picasa Web, I looked for my reversal ring (I tucked it away last year after a bit of playing around) and went out for some "hardcore handhold extreme macros" :-D with the reversal ring and the 35mm (and it just occurred to me that I did the exact same thing last year in March, except I was using the old 28mm and the 50mm then).

The exposure with the actual number 10000 (DSCF0001) was a fail - and I deleted it before I noticed the historic number... duh. Here's exposure number 9999 instead:

 Alpine Squill (FinePix S5Pro, 1/100s @ ISO 400; 35mm with Nikon BR2A, f/5.6)

I don't know what kind of flower that is. This is an "Alpine Squill" (Scilla bifolia, german "Blaustern" which means, very literal and fitting the appearance, "blue star") and it is really really small (about 15mm in diameter, when the buds are fully open they are six pointed stars). But what I can tell you is that the success/failure ratio when going for handheld macros with the reversal ring is something like 1:5 - or even worse...

Crouching on the ground, the distance from lens to flower is something like one or two centimeters, the only way to focus is to move the camera forward and backward. The depth of field at these distances is limited to what seems like fractions of millimeters :-D unless you stop the lens down all the way - which turns the viewfinder almost pitch black if you're not in direct sunlight, and results in exposure times that are either impossible to hand hold OR that are too long for a sharp image.

I was struggling with that all the time today: the slightest breeze will make these little flowers wiggle like mad. And of course, that breeze set in the very moment I positioned myself and was just about to release the shutter. :-P

Therefore, the photo here is not really sharp - yes, I know that! ;-) I've got others that are better (IMHO) which I will show in my Picasa Web Album. I decided to show this one because of the shutter's anniversary. Happy 10k, shutter!