Somehow on Saturday I got to looking at my flickr favorites list.  One shot stood out to me that I had favorited forever ago with a desire to recreate one day.  It was a close up of some toothpicks that had an almost flower like feel to them.

It had been a while since broke out my gear and way longer since I had done any macro work.  So I got to playing with some toothpicks as well as one of those pin board toys that has hundreds of pins

Both of the subjects presented unique challenges.  It took quite a while to get the toothpicks lined up correctly to be able to get them to rotate and get the feel that I wanted.  I had to keep sticking in additional toothpicks into gaps, some would fall out when they wouldn’t have pressure on them (think jenga), shadows had to be correctly positioned to give separation, etc etc.

The pin board was very reflective so there was a lot of moving around of lights to get a good reflection and shadow relationship, changing the intensity of the lights (used two, one left, one right), making sure all the pins were down, getting them to be lined up correctly with the camera (with such a strong pattern its easy to tell when they aren’t right), etc .

The results are by no means gallery material, but they were a fun first stab at macro in the studio.  I’m glad I favorited that image so many years ago and finally got around to trying to recreate it.  There are many more that I am anxious to try in the future.  While I think it’s good to be your own photographer and not copy others, it doesn’t hurt to try and recreate things every now and then for education sake 🙂