LightningPaul

A close-up of my razor blade. The metal structures are amazing: so small and so much structure. Before taking the image I used an air pressure driven blower to remove all the dust. Despites that there is still some micro dust visible. The shot is made for the challenge Blade on the site Macroday.

UPDATE: I received the most votes on Macroday. Thanks for everyone who voted for me.


TECH-INFO: for this shot I used one speedlight flash, a second hand SB-80DX bought on eBay, equipped with a little softbox (Lumiquest Softbox III), which is actually a huge softbox to lit very small objects. I placed the light in almost the opposite direction of the camera. It's a bit moved to the left. This back light nicely reveals texture and details of the in focus metal areas. The flash power was set on 1/64 and got triggered with the cheap GI triggers, also bought on eBay. The shutter speed is set to 1/200s to kill all the ambient light. I regulated the lighting using the power on the flash and the aperture setting. The focusing distance was around 14 cm. Underneath the blade I placed a dark blue card sheet, purchased in a local stationary. I tried several compositions and picked the most spectacular one. Personally I like the diagonal lines a lot.
For post processing I converted the RAW file using ACR where I mainly increased clarity and vibrancy, and lowered the black fill to avoid to many totally blocked shadows. In Photoshop I slightly tweaked the curves, cropped it a bit and added a rectangular vignette.