Thursday, October 8, 2026

Macros and Monochrome and Moonshine


Macros


 

 
 

 

 When you want to imitate Ansel Adams, use Monochrome




Needless to say...I am NOT as good, or ever will be anywhere near as good, as Ansel Adams; even using my view camera.


A few more Macros


The caption under the buzzard is NOT a link. I did not choose 'make a link' Google does it on its own.  I removed and reinserted the image and caption several times.

 So far, I think comments work on this blog. I do know I cannot comment on many blogs due to some kind of bug in Blogger.

 

MOONSHINE


Moon. SX10- fully optically and digitally zoomed to 80X

Jupiter above the moon.  This was only visible one morning.

Not too bad for an old digital camera. The fuzzy looking crescent is not distortion or out of focus, it is craters.





Here is one I did not expect.  Planets in focus.  I happened to trigger the shutter not knowing anything was within the frame.  Jupiter is barely visible at the bottom, Mars iin the middle of 2 smaller stars or planets and a tiny planet or star near the upper right corner.

Moon images with this camera are very challenging as the SX 10 auto focus likes to cycle from near to infinity to near to infinity and will not stay at infinity.  At least with a little work moon images are possible. I do not know if the self timer will work as focus keeps cycling.  My Kodak P850 will stay at infinity, but I do not recall if I was ever able to get any images of the moon. I may give the SX10 a try next full moon after messing with CHDK.

Such great weather, I typed outside on the tailgate of my overly loaded pickup truck.

 

Wish I had a star filter that will fit the SX10.  There will be some filters arriving soon, but I forget if I ordered a star.

BTW Canon likes to hide the fact that 52mm filters fit the camera.  My suspicion is that the early Canon autofocus will not work properly with a lens filter as the SX10 has quite odd AF compared to all the other early digicams I used.   AF is where I hope CHDK will help.

6 comments:

  1. I have read that the thread is not an actual 52mm thread, and so you'd be cutting threads every time you screwed on/off a filter. Some report that screwing on a 52->58mm adapter and leaving it on permanently works fine, because then you're doing metal on metal threads when actually using filters.

    Hmmn, I wonder if CHDK will cycle into digital zoom on my zoomy script. I've had digital zoom to 80x shut off. I should try that.

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    1. I found a thread on CHDK about the SD setting. I'm going to lay with it. I tried tracing some aircraft today, and the focus is really funky. Optical zoom seems ok once focus is established, but digital is another issue.

      I ordered a bayonet to 58mm filter adapter because my P850 used 58mm filters and 58mm threaded hood so I have limited 58mm filters. I have a 52mm on it right now and there was no threading problem, but I don't like metal filter rings on a plastic lens thread.

      Most of my filters are 55mm and 62mm except for a few for my micro four thirds lenses and view camera lenses. Surprisingly many of my view camera filters fit my MFT lenses.

      I was reading a thread on the CHDK forum and some claim focus can be fixed in the SD setting.

      I hope to try that and if it won't work try a script. They don't seem all that complicated.

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    2. Yuh, just read through setting focus through CHDK and you can lock out the autofocus and set it to either lock to a setting or to a specific distance in mm. Something I'm planning for the zoomy script to prevent the AF seeking in between zoom settings. Finding the infinite focus point is apparently something you need to test to dial in for each camera. There's a script for that in the "test" scripts, I think.

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    3. I read some of the AF lock scripting comments and such on CHDK forums yesterday. Also looking at the metadata on the moon images, none of it is the same optical extension. It varies from 90,xxmm to 100mm. I expected all to be fully extended @ 100mm. None indicate anything for digital zoom. Values in those variables are all empty. Now to find the digital distance of the zoom.

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  2. These are good! I particularly like the interior views of flowers.

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    1. Thanks Richard. I like to do flowers and insects macros Many roses and few insects in the yard. My daughter likes copies of what I do so she can paint them on canvas. She likes painting roses the most.

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