Continuing the theme of colours and flowers, where better to go than a botanical garden in Frankfurt to try out my new macro extender for my camera. Here is my first go at macro photography with a Hasselblad camera.
So I kind of cheated a bit this week, by using the same film as the previous week! (I think I am the only one that really cares about this travesty!). However, there is good reason for it: I had an extra roll of Rollei CN 200, I thought it would be fun to test out a similar theme (colours / flowers), and I am also literally running out of Medium Format film options!
So I decided to head over to Frankfurt's Palmengarten, a real nice city botanical garden of 22 hectares opened as long ago as 1871! It's a real nice open space right in the middle of the city and as you can imagine, has lots and lots of variety of colours, plants, trees, flowers, and its fair share of animals flocking around the place.
I had also recently picked up a very good value 55mm extender for my Hasselblad (basically an empty tube that you put between the lens and the camera body, extending the lens from the film), so I thought this would be an ideal place to try it out. It also allows for much closer focusing, with this one in particular being really good for crazy close macro work.
So, back to the photographs. I had no specific plan other than walking into the Palmengarten and seeing what caught my eye. I was interested in cool colours and anything interesting to magnify. I nearly did manage to photograph a bumble bee on a flower, but with the camera so close when I looked inside the viewfinder I got such a fright (this thing looked like a Apache Helicopter waiting to invade somewhere), I ran for the hills - and that was the end of my cool bee shot.
As always, photographs are clickable for full screen view - the colours really 'pop' on a bigger tablet or laptop screen. Enjoy!
I really like this shot, pity about the white brick (or whatever it is in the background), it spoils the shot a bit. Look how bright the pink and yellows are! And let me tell you, this flower was absolutely tiny!
Did not quite come out as I had hoped. I won't bore you with the details but it is hard to get the depth of field right (think what is 'in' versus 'out' of focus) in macro photography, and sometimes you get only part of the subject in focus and the rest is just a 'gloopy' out of focus mess.
Tiny, tiny rain drops.
One of my favourite shots - love the bright yellow!
Another goopy mess - nice try though, macro photography is not easy!
I can see the interest people have in macro photography, once you get down there (literally on your hands and knees) and with a good tripod focus in on the smallest of subjects, it's like a whole universe down there.
Bit out of focus, but I liked the overall greens here.
The colours are not quite right here, but I like the overall composition. I had some interesting colour results when I shot this film in Madrid for Week 36 too...
Could have got a bit closer, but I like how it came out.
Overall impressions
Following on from my usage of this film in Madrid, I was happy with the results. I have done a bit of macro photography before but nothing too detailed, so it is something that can take a while to perfect. There are also some exposure challenges to overcome when using such a long (55mm) extender, as the light has to travel further to hit the film, you need to adjust for this.
But overall not a bad effort at all. This film also continues to produce some nice colours, and as I said previously for such a decent price point it is certainly a film I can recommend using. And come to think of it, being up to Week 37, there aren't that many films that I would NOT recommend. I will have to think about how to prioritise all of them when I give my final thoughts after Week 52!
So there you have it, another week in and closer to Week 52! Hey, and if I can make tiny flowers and leaves look interesting, then imagine what you can do - so get back out there and take some more photographs!
The next few week's will be great, including the super sharp Ilford Pan F 50, the wacky colour changing Revelog 460nm, maybe some Redscale film, and more portait shots - go, go, go!!!
Cheers,
Neil
