Today I practiced a bit of photography at home with Dad. We were using his Fuji X-T1 mirrorless camera with a 35mm lens, on a tripod and with a cable release to avoid camera shake. Later we added a +10 Close-up lens in order for me to see how much extra detail we could get by being able to focus closer up.

With just the 35mm lense we had to be about 40cm away to get the camera to focus. The subject we chose was a crab shell (carapace), one from an edible or brown crab (Cancer pagurus) that we cooked so it is a bit more orange than brown.

That gave us a picture like this (cropped using paint.NET. See Links).

Not bad … but then we tried the +10 (strongest) Close-up Lens.( The others in the set were +1, +2 and +4). This screwed into the front of the 35mm lens (marked as 52mm diameter).

The we were able to get much closer; only about 8cm away from the crab-shell:

The difference was amazing. I was so impressed to see the little hairs.

We then played with the image, this time using GIMP (also in Links) for finer control. This program is a bit scary with so may tools,menu options and things but we just played with the colour settings (to make less orange), contrast and brightness, added a High Pass Filter (for sharpness, apparently) and now the image looks like this:

We are off to a new beach tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something worthwhile and put this all to good use.