I want to bring this blog back to what it first intended to be — a blog to discuss about macro photography. I’ve been stabbing in all directions this past one year, forgetting what I truly wanted for this blog.

Dear readers, from now on, I shall steer this blog back to its original path — discussing all things macro. Please feel free to hop onto the macro journey…

Pages from Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"

My still limited macro set up does not allow me yet to take extreme macro photography, something as extreme as shooting self-portrait from the reflection of the tip of a ball point pen, something as extreme and as clear as this, which was taken by combining a Canon S1 IS compact camera and a reverse DSLR lens. The web page is in Russian but the tool of the craft speaks universal language.

I’m trying to get there but at the moment, this is the closest I can get to the ball point tip. The photo was shot with a Canon PowerShot G6, and a Raynox DCR-250 super macro conversion lens.

Ball point tip macro

Joss sticks are an integral part of many cultures, form the Middle East to Asia, Africa to Southeast Asia.

According to an entry at Wikipedia, joss or incense sticks are also used in ritual purification, aromatherapy, meditation, masking bad odours, and in medicine. The photo here was taken with a smc Pentax D FA 100mm f2.8 Macro WR lens on a K-7.

These nice pictures here are from reader Hurshy, who emailed them yesterday. Pictures were taken with the 12.1-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD780 IS or also known as the Digital IXUS 100 IS. I particularly like the glass picture.

If you have macro or close-up photos to share with this blog’s readers, please e-mail them to jaxonsblog at gmail dot com.

There are numerous ways to shoot toy helicopter photographs. You can shoot them while they are lying idle or about to take off or in mid-flight.

But you can also vary the photographs by placing the toy helicopter on a reflective surface, such as the hood of a car — the shinier the surface the better.

This black and white photo is deliberately taken with the shutter speed set at 1 second, with the ISO set at 1600 to achieve the effect of a whitewashed background.

Then I tweaked it further using a photo editor to create an unrealistically high contrast picture. I’m experimenting.

Several visitors of this blog and my Flickr photopage have asked me if it is possible to show how the Canon PowerShot SX1 IS performs in low light.

Well, here is one of the shots I managed to compose. This is an out-of-camera image with no post-processing done, except for resizing to fit this blog’s width, cropping to tighten the composition and minor sharpening.

Here are the photo’s properties: Camera: Canon PowerShot SX1 IS; Exposure: 1 sec, Aperture: f/8; Focal Length: 15.5mm; ISO Speed: 80; Self-timer: 0.1; Focus Mode: Manual Focus.

Black is always a superb background colour for macro photographs as it makes the subject stand out within a frame.

Here in this picture, I used a black plastic hardcover of a “clear holder” file for the background, hence the yellowish reflection at the base of the paper clip.

This effect will not be achieved had I used other types of materials such as paper or canvas. Some photographers prefer to use black velvet as background, which is also an excellent choice.

Camera: Canon PowerShot G6, Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60), Aperture: f/2.2, Focal Length: 11.2 mm, Exposure Bias: 0/3 EV, Flash: Flash fired, Image Quality: Superfine, Camera ISO: 50, Metering Mode: Evaluative, Focus Range: Super Macro.