Narcissus

[Andy Perrin]

This is some kind of common narcissus. I'm not very good at nailing down the species, but I'll put it in here if someone tells me. The flower was a windfall, so I took it home and photographed it indoors where it couldn't blow around in the crazy winds we're having this month.

 

All the visible reference shots are with the iPhone 6S Plus. The lighting was sunshine, or sunshine with a Tuofeng UV torch. The camera was the NEX-7, the lens was the Novoflex Noflexar 35/3.5 in all cases. The filter was the 330WB80 described in the other thread, mounted behind the lens with poster putty.

 

Processing was with Photo Ninja and Photoshop. White balance was all in-camera off the pavement out my window (I had the window down, so the sunshine was not filtered though my window for these).

 

Vis reference:

 

UV, sunshine, F/16, 25", ISO100

 

UV, sunshine+torch, F/16, 20", ISO100

 

Vis reference for closeup:

 

UV, sunshine, F/16, 20", ISO100

 

UV, sunshine+torch, F/16, 25", ISO100

 

(Edit: screwed up the last pic, posting the same one twice by accident. Fixed now.)

[Andrea B.]

Nice work, Andy. You've gotten lots of the delightful textures brought out by UV light.

 

I don't know what this particular species is. There are literally thousands of species and cultivars in this genus, so unless someone is thoughtful enough to hand us a plant tag with our spring flowers, we just have to let it go with a generic "Narcissus sp." label. :D

 

Are you finding the Noflexar useful for close-up work? Did you get the hang of the extension? Scared me that I was going to break that lens the first time I pulled on it.

 

There is something I notice in your Sunshine + Torch photos. Because the torch beam does not reach all portions of the flower, there are some areas in which a kind of false UV-signature is present which isn't really there because the more monochrome torchlight has not 'washed out' the broadband sunlight response. I have had this exact same thing happen when shooting with a UV torch in sunshine. It is something about which we probably need to be careful when making documentary UV photos, I suppose? For "ordinary" UV work, this is probably not of importance? (Although I had to chuckle when I wrote "ordinary". Is there anything ordinary about UV photography??)

 

It is difficult to describe the areas, so I'll just post a little crop to point out one of the areas I'm talking about.

 

Here are crops from the last pair of photos. On the left is a portion of the petal to the left of the "cup" in the Sun Only version. On the right is the Sun + Torch version. This version shows a dark area on the petal as though the UV torch did not reach that area. It could possibly be misread as some kind of UV-patterning, but it isn't really. Call it torch-shadow perhaps??

 

Sun from left and torchlight from right, it looks to me like. Hence "torch-shadow".

 

(Again, I remind everyone this is just an observation about something I've experienced in my own work and it is not a criticism at all, OK?? Thanks.)

[Andy Perrin]

Yep, that's definitely a shadow, and you are correct about where I was standing. I don't think it's false, though, (which to me suggests some kind of image artifact that arises between the point that the light hits the camera lens and continuing back through the chain to the final processed image). It's a real shadow, really cast by a UV torch! If you had eyes that could see UV, you would see the same shadow with them, in other words. But I'll grant you that if you mistook it for part of the pattern of the flower you could be misled. What I need is some kind of diffuse light source, like a flash bounced off Teflon sheet, for example.

 

The Noflexar is working wonderfully! It's my favorite lens. It's the sharpest of the three I have (the Steinheil EDIXA auto-cassaron 50/2.8, and the Hanimar 35/3.5 being the other two). It pulls out rather abruptly as you said, but I've started to get the hang of it. What I am having trouble with is guaranteeing that everything is in focus, which I suspect relates more to my rudimentary photography skills than any of the lenses themselves.

[Andrea B.]

I was trying to say the real torchshadow might give rise to a misinterpretation of that shadow as a uv-signature, but it would be a false uv-sig. However, nevermind. "-) We both get it.

 

Working that close you will never get everything in focus, so simply place the plane of sharpest focus on the most interesting area of the subject. An area may be interesting for either documentary or artistic reasons (or both).

 

[Cadmium]

Andy, Very nice shots!