Peacock tail pictures.

I am just submitting a number of images all based around a Peacock feather. I am sure that I am not alone in being absolutely entranced with the beautiful, colour, patterns, textures and irridencence of these fabulous birds.
After seeing an item on DA, that looked so beautiful I thought to myself, "I can do that" and you can see the result in my gallery - Still life. See  "Dreamy Aspirations" by "=tleach0608" - (sorry not yet found out how to add alink in a journal)

It started on Saturday, took Mum out, (as it is less crowded than Sunday) to a Garden Centre, to her some items for her garden, as I was passing through the artificial flowers area, I spied a Peacock Feather decorative twig and half expected it to be an artifical one, but to my surprise it was real. It was not in perfect condition and consisted of three "eyes" and a few other feathers. Only £1.35 the lot - could not believe it.

Well last night I set up in my Lounge, took the feathers off the twig, and attempted to get the eye feathers to join up again as they normally are, after half an hour of messing around, I eventually got them to a reasonable standard to allow photography to commence.

My next problem was what lens to use, for the complete feathers I could use my Canon 17-85mm IS kit lens, but I wanted to try and get into the detail into the shot.

I tried two different set ups for the broader shots I used my 50mm f/1.4 as it just is so bright, I set up the feather onto a piece of my wifes' card making material (with permission I might add, but under threat of death if I damaged anything). As I got closer in I started adding the Kenko extention tubes. It surprised me how close you have to be under these circumstances, but my new Manfrotto tripod really proved to be a winner, really solid and the adjstment knobs are big and bulky making fine control really easy. The position of the knobs also are really logically placed, never once did I go for the wrong knob, with my old tripod I kept undoing the wrong fiddly one or did not tighten them up properly or they came loose. Often when I moved the tripod it was normal for the camera/lens would flop down more often than not crushing my hand. The times I have wanted to throw the whole at the wall in temper, but fortunately I didn't or my camera would have been toast. My old tripod is now going to be a light stand when i sort out a suitable light. I want to get a proper portrait light at some stage.

For lighting, I set up in the middle of the lounge, not the best place, but the ceiling light is one of those fancy things with 12 mini halogens (tungsten WB) and 12 really bright white leds pointing straight down (WB flash or tube).
I then used another little toy I bought at the Focus on Imaging show, my Joby gorillapod LED lamp, this has three fully adjustable legs on it allowing its pure white superbright LED to be focussed on any part of the set up.

I did my shooting totally on manual setting, but did use my Live View function (Canon 500D) including its zoom function to get the focus pin sharp. Lots of shots were taken making aperture adjustments to get the right depth of field, some exposures were 15/30 seconds long to compensate. Most were taken at ISO 100 to try and keep noise to a minimum.

As the shoot progressed, I kept on adding more elements, the shell, water drops and glitter. The glitter was also supplied by my wife from her card making material, the colour of the glitter was all different, and to me it was just glitter, but to my surprise, the glitter was astounding, as you will be able to see in some shots, each of the microscopic glitter particles are hexagonal and very well made, being consistent in shape and with neat edges.

The water droplets were put in place with a hyperdermic syringe, but even with a big needle it is very easy to overdo it as it seems to come out with such pressure. another problem was that the feather is water repellent (which is good - keeping the water in drops) but as the the feather is not flat and possibly not level as the water tended to roll to the lowest point, so I had to suck it back up and keep moving it.

Now as mentioned above I kept changing the aperture setting to control the depth of field, and this increased exposure time, so I took advantage of this to move the Gorillapod led light source all around the subject cutting down on harsh shadows, but it did make some interesting highlights on the water drops. One side benefit was that the glitter tended to reflect the bright light back to the lens making some pretty starburst on some of the specks of glitter.

Some of the water drops lost their surface tension and started to soak into the feather and then down into the card below (so had to suck it up quick before I paid the ultimate price). Funny the glitter was not sucked up as it was just too big to go up the needle.

The little shell I found on a walk with my daughter on Sunday afternoon to some lakes near the Wyevale garden centre, I managed to get some amazing pictures there. In particular some of the most beautiful snowdrops, giant double flowers, with colour in them - (coming to my Deviant gallery soon). My wife did not think the shell was necessary so I stopped using it for the latter shots, also it suffered from the shallow depth of field as well so it had to go.

The really close in images of the little barbs that make up the filaments of the feathers were I think taken with my 100mm f/2.8 Maco with a couple of the extention rings. This works really well, so there will be more (hopefully good) images to come from this combination.

I also have the Canon MR-14EX macro light which is ideal for this scenario, but with the extention rings the lens has to be so close to the subject, as a result the bulky case of the ring light physically stops you for getting in close enough, so I continue to use it for my normal use in getting macro flowers to look well lit. For some of my last shots, I did not use the little Gorillpod light letting the room light be my only source, the results were suprisingly good, long exposure, but with the tripod not a problem.

Overall I really enjoyed the experience, this is my first time where I have set up a scene to photograph and I am pleased with the results, as I have had nine favourites and six comments during the writing of this journal from just my first nine images I think that the DA community also approves. The only downside of this little project, was the cleaning up the glitter, and ensuring that none gets anywhere in my camera, lenses or tubes. However this morning my wife told me how lovely I looked with a load of glitter in my beard.

I have not forgotten my Stars Wars Live in Concert episode as promised in my first journal, so will do this soon.

Please leave feedback as it my only way of knowing if what I write is of interest to people out there.