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UltravioletPhotography

Eremophila complanata


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An Australian wildflower taken to get started on what looks like being a long journey until I can turn out half decent images

 

These are growing in our garden and have just started to flower as it's Spring here Down Under

 

When I am happy with the images I will add all the botanical stuff, which will be a considerable challenge for a chemist!

 

post-28-0-84184400-1378706427.jpg

 

Visible light, sunlight, Pentax K-5, 105 mm Universe Kogaku America quartz lens, B+W UV/IR cut filter, 1/500 s @ f/8 ISO 200, Spectralon white balance

 

post-28-0-01130400-1378706570.jpg

 

UV, sunlight, Pentax K-5, 105 mm Universe Kogaku America quartz lens, Baader U filter, 3.0 s @ f/16 ISO 200, Spectralon white balance

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I don't think you will have too long to go before you will be happy with your images. You're looking pretty good here. And the best way to learn is to shoot every day (as I'm sure you know). :D

 

As for the formal write-ups, if you have the correct ID, all else follows. And we have plenty of examples already posted to show the basic style. I myself am not a botanist by training either, but we have Bjørn to oversee things. He will always let us know if something needs a correction.

 

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I wanted to let you (and all) know that I just got my Pentax K5 in hand!!! I'm sooooo excited!!!!! Found a nice used body from KEH.com for $560. Body only - literally - got none of the "stuff" that ordinarily comes with the K5. KEH did include a new non-Pentax battery and charger.

 

I shot with the K5 yesterday, and must say I love the handling of the camera. I'm familiar with Pentax menu-ing and basic settings from using my little novelty Pentax-Q for a couple of years. I think Pentax does menu-ing quite well - everything on a page is accessible at a glance, no need to "wrap" thru the list. So I will get the K5 off to Kolari Vision for a conversion this week.

 

One benefit of this K5 will be that my old M42 lenses will reach infinity focus using the Pentax K-to-M42 mount adapter. And with the correct spacer ring, I think my old M39s will be useable at infinity also.

 

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I have a few suggestions for you on your photos. Please let me know if they are useful or not. Some of these things I have encountered myself in learning UV photography, so I pass them along.

  • Shoot in "neutral" settings. For the K5, my tentative recommendation is the Natural setting. Shooting neutral helps get a better exposure by keeping saturation and contrast down. They can be added easily if needed in the editor.
  • Lift the shadows a bit. There is information there.
  • Use sRGB colour profile for posting online.
    It appears you have an Adobe (aRGB) colour profile applied to your images? You need to use an sRGB profile for online viewing because most browsers are not colour profile aware. So shoot in aRGB if you want, edit in ProPhotoRGB and for the last step convert the profile to sRGB for saving as a Jpeg.
  • Profile the Visible colour of your converted K5.
    I don't know what converter/editor you are using, so I can't make any specific suggestions as to how best to accomplish that. For the UV foto, white balance on Spectralon is enough. But that will not give you completely correct colours for the Visible shot.

Lifted shadows and sRGB colour profile:

daveFlower.jpg

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Thank you Bjorn and Andrea,

 

As a chemist I know the importance of standards and since I couldn't find any of your usual UV flowers to shoot to see how my images compared I was flying blind. I can handle species names but going up a level or two just confuses me. There are several very good books on Australian native plants but it is still a developing field.

 

When the new topic about dust removal surfaced a few days ago I didn't want to add that the Pentax dust removal is built into the sensor mount as it uses the mechanism for stabilising images by moving the sensor and it still appears to work in my converted K20D (IR with a type 87 filter) and K-5 with a plain (quartz I think) filter. The K-5 doesn't give such a dust removal shaking on turning the camera on as the K-20. I always turn the anti-shake mechanism off anyway when using the camera on a tripod. I used to use a lot of 35 mm Kodak HIE IR film in a Pentax SPII, and the great advantage of doing it digitally is the lack of scratches! My digital images look a lot like those from Konica IR roll film.

You might like to add cameraclinic.com.au to the list of converters, they have a pretty good site as well.

 

Thanks for your comments about my visible image. As a darkroom B&W print man specialising in landscapes I tend to be rather casual about digital camera settings (I couldn't tell you without looking at the camera where they were set). I convert my UV shots in Photo Ninja and so did the same with the visible shot with no other changes except using a stored setting for WB made by clicking the WB tool on an image of a mini Color Checker with a Spectralon sample alongside, I clicked on the Spectralon for both UV and visible but must admit I didn't check if there was any difference in visible by using a grey patch instead. I should also admit that my Spectralon is an un-calibrated sample which the local agent kindly sent me. Photo Ninja appears to be using the built in K-5 profile. I just read how to build a camera profile so will give that a go.

 

I rendered the images from PN to tiff files, took them into CS5 because I'm used to that program, added a Levels adjustment layer (we're still 16 bit at this stage), pulled in the white point to about the start of the curve, then flattened and converted to jpeg. My real interest is making prints, so my NEC 22 inch monitor is kept profiled as is my Epson 3800 printer / paper combination so I don't any longer get unpleasant surprises when I press Print. I have my camera set to Adobe RGB as is my CS5 workspace. I take your point about converting to sRGB before submitting images, I'll try to remember but I don't think I will go as far as editing in ProPhotoRGB, I don't think my screen/printer combination can even quite get the the edges of Adobe RGB.

 

Incidentally I found on the digilloyd blog that Chrome is color space aware, as are Safari, Mozilla and Firefox.

 

I didn't open up the shadows of the visible shot because I didn't think of doing it, slack again! The visible shot is a bit (actually a lot) softer than I would like due to the quartz lens, but I've just joined the queue to get a real lens from Company Seven. And I've joined Shane's line for a UV flash.... Sooo these image are all really just "ranging shots" to get me into the right ball park fro when it all comes together. You might be surprised how good and usable Live View is on the K-5 with the Baader U over the lens.

 

When the sun next shines I'll shoot the mini CC and do some work to see where I am in the visible color universe. I always used to use, for my previous visible macro shots with my Planar 100 macro lens, a preset in ACR based on one of the CC grey patches.

 

One thing I have noticed is that the insides of some of my eremophila shots, which have quite a deep throat, come out quite dark as the flower seems to be more opaque to UV than to visible so the details inside are harder to see. Looks like a but of fiddling with the flash positioning when I get it, I tried reflecting sunlight (not on this one) but I didn't get that right either.

 

Cheers,

 

Dave

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A UV-darker inner throat sounds right - this is a behaviour frequently seen on 3-D flowers.

 

When you get the details resolved you likely see a lining of conical cells there as well.

 

Your plans for further purchase(s) may be costly .... Is it the UV-Nikkor you are aiming at?

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Thanks once again Bjorn,

My wife recently bought a microscope so she could examine various parts of eucalypts to put into a computer key called Euclid. I needed an excuse to look for an adapter to fit my Pentax K-5 body and perhaps you have given me one. I imagine I would only be looking at the details in visible light but perhaps you could point me in the direction of a good link for a novice.

 

It is reckoned that there are two types of eremophila, ones pollinated by insects and others by birds (such as honey eaters with long thin beaks). The last time our land mass was in contact with anywhere else in the world was millions of years ago - well before UV photography was invented :D

 

I was somewhat surprised when I recently emailed Company Seven to learn that due to the very favorable Yen/USD rate since earlier this year the current price of the UV-Nikkor is USD 7400 which I gathered is about USD 2000 less than it used to be. So, they are rushed off their feet, selling all they can import and currently filling deliveries for November onwards! I have placed the order and transferred the funds.

 

I will try to take shots of a range of Aussie wildflowers, as far as I have been able (with Google) to find out there was a paper published in 1989 of studies done on film of UV reflectance patterns in Australian native plants (B.R. Randell) and more recent ones by AG Dyer looking at color vision in bees and birds with unpublished UV photographs of a range of flowers. I always believe in serendipity as a driving force, I hope that will prove to be the case with my attempts to record our flowers in UV.

 

Cheers,

 

Dave

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Well, Dave, as Mom used to say, "You are cookin' with gas now, honey!!" :D

In other words, it certainly seems like you have everything in place to do a great job with your UV floral studies. It will be very exciting to have some native Australian flowers posted. You will get the IDs eventually.

 

Let's see....in no particular order:

 

K5 dust shaker left in place.

I will go amend our Stickies to say that sometimes the dust shaker is not removed from every camera. Thanks for the heads up on that.

 

The Spectralon need not be calibrated.

Your particular chunk of it appears to satisfactorily pull the UV neutrals into place. That is all that is needed. This is false colour, so what we are aiming at is simply a standardized UV palette of blues, yellows and greys...and greyish-blues and greyish yellows. We are not looking to match foto tones to the actual reflectance. Doing that would "undo" the gamma curve applied to photos during conversion and make any photo appear strange looking to our human vision. (Cameras see/record linearly; human eyes don't).

 

Photo Ninja - a great converter for this work.

I have a tutorial I wrote for profiling a Custom profile in PN. It is posted on another site, so I'll get it copied here. Easy enough to figure out without reading the tut, but I had a slow day and wrote it up anyway.

The alternate way to get the flower's Visible colour correct is to use a non-modified camera. :D It isn't really necessary to have the identical view of the Visible and UV flower. Similar views are good enough.

 

cameraclinic.com.au

Thanks for the reference. I will check them out and add them to our Stickies.

 

Chrome is color space aware, as are Safari, Mozilla and Firefox.

Most people have no idea how to make use of that. So sRGB is the way to go for now. That way your version of a flower won't look wacky next to my version of that flower out there in the wild and wooly web. Just add sRGB during the "Save As" step when saving the resized TIFF as a JPG for the web. No need to apply it to your master TIF.

Actually I have no clue as to how to set up colour awareness on Firefox. I've just looked through all the menus and find nothing. I'll have to google around.

 

Papers - gonna look 'em up. Thanks for the references. Most of the early film-based UV fotos seem almost primitive compared to what we can do with UV digital, so your contributions will be useful to someone someday. :D

 

Congratulations on the upcoming arrival of your UV-Nikkor !!! It is a wonderful lens.

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I'm sure you'll find the UV-Nikkor a wonderful lens. However, on what camera? The usual Pentax-F adapters have corrective optics to make infinity focus possible, but that is a no-no in UV.

 

If you want to keep the K5 it might be possible to remove the F-mount on the UV-Nikkor and replace it with a Pentax mount. The register difference is 1.04 mm (Nikon has the longest).

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Bjørn, I have a question for you about that. The Nikon F-mount register/flange distance is 46.50mm and for the Pentax K-mount it is 45.46mm. Is it possible to adjust for that 1.04mm difference in any way? Without using a optical glass insert, I mean.

Thanks.

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I just described how ... The F mount must be replaced with a corresponding one for the Pentax. That might reduce the difference slightly. The remainder must be taken up by the lens' ability to focus "beyond infinity". Some lenses do allow the internal focusing stop to be relocated which could win you a few fractions of a mm as well.

 

Even at a reduced price $7400 the UV-Nikkor is a bit expensive as an experimental target for serious Dremel work. So if the suggestions above don't pan out, the only option is to add a [modified] Nikon to the purchase list.

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I'm not sure I would want to compromise the quality of a $7000 UV-Nikkor or Coastal 60/4 even if the mount adaptor had a UV-capable lens.

 

Interestingly, you can fit an AIS F-mount lens into a K-mount body, but I have no idea how secure that is. It doesn't feel like it is quite locked tight. But I didn't want to risk any damage by stressing it to test the lock. When I was doing this dangerous little experiment just a while ago, I didn't test infinity focus (dark out) although I did get about 30' focus.

 

A new 24MP Nikon D3200 is only $550 on the street currently. It would make a great companion for the UV-Nikkor. A D600 or D800 would be even better.

 

Mount surgery on the UV-Nikkor would probably cost at least $500. And is a bit scarey.

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Thanks Bjorn,

 

Since I would have bought an adapter on-line I wouldn't have known that it contained a lens until I opened the box and then commented in well chosen phrases. However, there's more ways to kill a cat. I have never used my 100 mm Macro Planar on infinity focus, as far as I'm concerned the focus screw is only to set magnification, the Manfrotto track looks after focus. I do have a Novoflex bellows and just contacted the agent in Sydney to find he had a Nikon adapter in stock to go on the front of the bellows instead of my Pentax one. If I had to go to a Nikon camera I would lean towards the D7100 I think.

 

Cheers,

 

Dave

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With a bellows device, just put an F mount on its front replacing the original. The Nikon K3 ring is perfect for that purpose. If you don't have one, PM me your address and I'll send you a surplus one from my storage bins. Or get the entire K-ring set (typically $30 or so) as these items are to the experimental photographer what Lego bricks are to children, ie. mandatory. I probably have [ab]used more than 20 of these sets by now.
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Wiser heads than mine say it wont work but why not try swapping out the glass for a fused silica lens in one of these type adapters. http://fotodioxpro.c...nt-adapter.html ???? Has anyone actually tried to see?

That Nikon F Lens to Pentax K Camera adapter glass lens is removable. http://www.photoxgear.com/download/glass-adaptor-removal.pdf Without the lens it would make a very secure short macro tube/mount converter if INF focus is not a priority. The place where the lens was located would make tempting location for an internal filter.
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One probably could put a smaller filter (say 1.25 ") filter(s) there. Since filter price tends to correlate with size, this approach would allow for easier experimentation with various filter combinations.
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Got the bellows adapter to fit a Nikon F lens, so now my Pentax K-5 body on the other end of the bellows doesn't know, or care, whether I use a lens with a Nikon F or Pentax K fitting. Now the long wait for the lens, but we are used to waiting for stuff here.
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Do note that even a short bellows draw + adapter(s) will bring the UV-Nikkor to around 1:2 or thereabouts. In fact, with the dedicated PN-11 extension tube (length 52.5 mm) you are at 1:2 with the lens focused to infinity.

 

Sooner or later you probably want to make the lens able to operate differently. Thus, the issue of mount(s) or alternative camera(s) need to be addressed.

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I found again the reference on diglloyd to web browsers display of color space

 

http://diglloyd.com/...-rendition.html

 

It will probably throw up more questions than answers.

 

As I promised somewhere above, since the sun was out here yesterday, I took some exciting Mini Color Checker shots. Firstly (top row) on the Pentax K-5 full spectrum camera using a B+W UV/IR cut filter on the Quartz 105 mm lens and on the Zeiss 100 mm Macro Planar. I took ALL the images, in turn, into Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) because I'm a print nerd and that's my visual work flow in Bridge/CS5 (don't use Lightroom) and did a one square white balance (WB) on the second grey square from the bottom left. I then repeated the procedure using a Pentax K-7 (which is actually a generation older than the K-5 despite what you might think!!!) unconverted with NO filter on the lenses (not even the ubiquitous UV or protection filter that we all forget is there). I saved all images as PSD files ( the Photoshop equivalent of TIFF), again because I always do that, did a levels adjustment layer to get the densities of the images somewhere near to each other, flattened, converted to jpeg with sRGB tag (I think) and here's the result.

 

post-28-0-47587400-1379808762.jpg

 

I also printed from the composite PSD Adobe RGB file onto three different papers for which I have had my Epson 3800 printer profiled (Harman Gloss FB [which no longer exists out here alas], Epson Traditional Photo Paper, and Ilford Gold Mono Silk) and my conclusion was that there were only minimal differences in the prints on different papers.

 

I really wanted to know if the UV/IR cut filter on the full spectrum camera was close to the unconverted camera result and it looks "close enough for a Government job" to me. I'm a printer at heart and the only way I can be sure that the image is under my control is by making a print and holding it in my paw. The world out there can look on their i-thingies, the images they see are only proxies at best.

 

Perhaps this will get me kicked out.

 

Cheers,

 

Dave

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