I got a new macro photography lens. The Moment Macro Lens. It allows me to take some pretty close up pictures and is a lot of fun and I expect to do more of these. A special thanks to my brother for getting me this lens for my birthday. I have been a fan of the Moment lenses for a while and am slowing building a collection of them. A lot of the photos I have posted here were taken through a Moment lens attached to my Pixel 3 smartphone. The lenses are interchangeable so when it comes time to upgrade my phone, I will be able to continue using them with the new phone.

To give a proper sense of scale, this photo is of the metal nib of a fountain pen. The base of the nib is engraved with the number 1.5 and indicates that it is a 1.5mm stub nib. What that means is that the tip of the nib is approx. 1.5mm wide.

I am just learning to use the macro lens and in a very experimental stage with accidental successes. Most of the pictures I took during my first session with this lens were interesting in that they demonstrated what the lens was capable of, but they didn’t turn out to be great pictures. Despite that, I really liked how this picture came out. The depth of field on this lens is pretty shallow so it is difficult to line up the subject properly. The base and the tip of the metal nib are already starting to go out of focus. There is little margin for error. The lens has a removable diffuser hood which I was using at the time, along with the built in flash on the Pixel 3. Normally I would shun the use of the flash because it has such a limited effective range, but since the phone is kept an inch or two away from the subject it is actually useful here. Between my excitement to start working with this lens, and my tendency to avoid using the built in flash, I accidentally covered the flash with my finger. This turned out to be quite the happy accident. First, it drastically reduced the amount of light on the subject giving it a dark and dramatic look. Second, it introduced a small amount of red light which reflected nicely on the metal surface and complemented the gold coloring.

As usual, I used Adobe Lightroom to tweak the light and color levels as well as run some noise reduction to achieve the final image. Nothing to drastic, just enough to make the color and details pop.