Macro Monday 16, hexagonal, the claw, and BRBE!

It was only in the final stages of writing this that I realized Monday was Christmas. I mean I knew Christmas was coming, as it always does. And that Monday was coming, as it always does. But the two of them, plus the Macro Monday feature had somehow slipped my mind.

So there are pre Christmas shots of Celina and Curtis checking out the tree. Stay tuned.

This is a followup to last week's macro shots of Julie's lovely hair, and one shot of Linda's. For this week I snipped a few hairs (red and white) of the famous moustache. Both of these are the cut end, not the pointy abraded end worn away from checking out everything I eat. My moustache hairs measure out at 33 mm in diameter, and clearly appear to be hexagonal when I look at them 1:1 in Lightroom, but I'm not sure it will show up so clearly here.

Curtis was right in there helping, being such a helpful cat. (Especially where food is concerned.) He generously donated a claw cast off, a bit of fur, and a whisker. As it turns out, his fur is significantly thinner than anybody's hair, about one quarter the diameter, near as I can tell. Both the shots above and below are at the same magnification, 5x plus the extension tubes.

One of his orange hairs. I'm pleased the colour shows up. In Lightroom at 1:1, this is between 3 and 4 mm in diameter.

This is the root end of a whisker. You can just start to see the internal structure.

Part way along the shaft, not far from the root.

Let me tell you, cat hair is not easy to photograph! It took a while to figure out how to clamp it down so it wouldn't move, and even more to figure out where the funny reflection was coming from. It seems the matt black surface of the bike stand was throwing reflections from the bright strobe lights. It's never done that before, but then, I've never been shooting quite so close it it either.

I was telling BRBE about it, and she wanted in on the action. Again, this is the same magnification, 5x on the lens, with 68 mm of extension tubes. In Lightroom at 1:1, Michelle's hair is about 18 or 19 mm in diameter, a bit thicker than Julie's 15 or 16 mm, and much thicker than Curtis's 3 to 4 mm. I have one other buddy, who we suspect has much thicker hair. It will be interesting to see if I can lure her into the photo studio next time she is over.

We looked up some info. The average human hair is about 20 to 100 microns in diameter, depending on the age of the person, and where exactly along the hair is measured. Older and closer to the root is thicker they say, and my moustache agrees. There are 1000 microns in a mm. No wonder I couldn't measure anyone's hair with the tools at my disposal.

So to get ourselves onto the same units for comparison purposes, let's assume Julie's hair is 20 microns thick in real life, and on the screen is about 15,000 microns. Am I doing the math right to say I'm magnifying it 750 times by the time it gets on screen? I'm thinking I've slipped a decimal place or two somehow.

Anyways, back to Michelle. She loved the colour refracted and reflected from the translucent hair! Her natural colour is a slightly reddish brown, and there are some grey hairs. Just a few, very distinguished. These were shot in between heartbeats, with her resting her head on the bike stand, so the background is more hair. No holding the hair involved. Yes, on the camera screen I could see her head moving slightly with every heart beat. She's such a good sport holding still while I fiddled with focus, especially since she could smell her cup of French Press coffee right there.

She was happy to see an image of the grey hair, and especially the clean end.

This is her skin. If you look carefully you can see the hair actually growing out from the follicle. Look at the lower part of the photo, sort of centre right and you can see one example clearly. These hairs are almost invisibly fine.

This was wall much more fun than I thought it would be, and the response has been interesting. In many cases people are yucked out by finding hair in unexpected places. How unexpected a place to find hair is a blog? Yet most of the comments are "cool!" One person is geeked out, which I take as a high compliment.

Cat photos tomorrow, promise.

More Yukon, Tombstone park in case you've forgotten

More from the September 2017 photo trip to the Yukon with Neil, Judy, Katie, and Dalia. I've been going back over photos, and while I'm not sure I'd class these as hidden gems, they were overlooked in the first round.

I've been doing a bit of research about renting a camper and driving all the way from Whitehorse to Tuk. At first the price is a bit of eek, but then I remember where it is. I'd love to take a month or two and roam around all over, taking a zillion photos of course. I'd love to be able to seek out a great vantage point, and have the time to wait for the light to be awesome.

You used to be able to see the mountains

This is progress?

That heap is what is technically known as a haul road. There are ginormous trucks hauling material back and forth, making the bees look like slackers. I liked the mountain view better, but sooner or later I'll be driving on that highway. Maybe the passenger can see the mountains. The driver had better keep their eyes on the road the way traffic has been here lately.

I have to admit I wonder what that little tree thinks of the whole production, and how it got spared.

It just snowed, as you may recall. This seems to press the stupid driver button for Calgarians. Or as some put it, the all season tire collision and coffee klatsch meet up. I'm glad I haven't had to be driving much lately.

My buddy Sean and I had a lovely morning tramping around South Glenmore park. The lighting was not the best, but the important part is being out, chatting with a buddy, and looking for the shots. He had run past there on the main path many times, but never been on the smaller paths.

A couple photos from the morning as the light was coming out.

I was quite taken by this little decorated tree. It warms my cold heart thinking that someone took the time and trouble to bring some ornaments and hang them on the tree.

Cats don't care about shopping

Nope. They lie there in a heap, ignoring the whole thing. I wish I could. Don't get me started. Shopping. Sheesh. Who invented that?

During one recent walk through Fish Creek I crawled under a bridge and was getting some shots of ice and rocks and reflections and stuff. I quite liked it and got a few compliments on it. You can see the original here, but I was playing with it as shapes, and converted it to black and white to see what that did. I'm not sure it works as well, but you can judge for yourself.

It's getting close to year end. Don't forget I'll be doing an Ask Me Anything early in the new year. Send a question, and I'll answer it, and probably more than you bargained for. See last year as an example.

Plus I'm working on Image of the Year. If there are any favourites that you'd like to remind me of, I'd be happy for your suggestions.

It snowed. I swam

They said 10 to 20 cm. More like 10 inches arrived here.

Typical carnage ensued. I shovelled last night, and I shovelled again this morning. Then off for a lovely swim in a nearly empty pool, thinking stroke thoughts. My golf score is 81. I haven't done that for a while, and there is a person deeply interested in that number. A goal for them, I think.

The funny thing was me lounging in the hot tub when a bunch of the swim club kids arrived. They'd been given a break, and didn't want to stand around getting cold. They'd barely sat down with their coach showed up to hustle them back to the pool for something. The looks on their faces!

I was out walking around a little bit. The best shot of the day (No, I'm not going to do an image of the day, or of the week feature.) happened by accident, of course. It's the first time I've got half decent bokeh with this lens.

Errands tomorrow, and a buddy photowalk on Friday! Hope the snow holds out.

A winter skyline

Like I say, fall is Calgary's best season. When I left to go to Yukon for a week in September it was summer. When I got back it was fall. It's been fall, more or less, till today. Today is winter. Snow.

I dropped Linda downtown, did some cameraing, then had a minor appointment. (Hint, I'm not deaf.) The roads were already greasy and I could see where a few people had given themselves or the drivers around them a thrill. It's only got worse since.

Two views from Enmax Park. Downtown in the snow.

The backside of my buddy Jeff's sculpture. I almost like the metal supporting rods more than the actual front of it.

Two views of the new zoo bridge. I snuck these in since the first blog about the zoo bridge didn't get that many readers.

Another snowy view of downtown. The geese were not interested in it, or in me. A few looked at me as I walked past them, but they didn't even waddle away. Safety in numbers or something. I like how the buildings were just fading in and out of visibility.

In the inevitable news department, I no longer have a living grandparent. My mom's mom passed away earlier today. I had begun to mentally compose a blog about being 60 and still having a grandparent alive, wondering how many other people could say that. A good blog idea down the drain.

Still, she outlived her life expectancy at birth by more than 30 years, and came THAT close to making 100. My mom is already well past her life expectancy at birth, (though she is only 29, somehow). According to stats Canada I'm going to kick off any time in the next decade or so. Bah! I say BAH! I'm going to be around and inflicting this blog on you for many decades yet to come.

Macro Monday 15, almost all of us have it

I'm just now listening to a famous song by The Cowsills. I know some of my readers are going whaaaaa? Others are already down memory lane. Here's a link so you can catch up with the story. Yes, this clip is from 2007, but the song comes from my youth.

There's a funny story that goes with this and ties into where I'm going. On a Facebook group some of my friends were talking about radio stations, and they were talking about one called Hair Nation. I'd never heard of it, of course, so I asked if they played The Cowsills. Of all the people, only my buddy Susi got it, and her comment was "oh Keith." (Hint, they don't.) Several of the people had to look it up, and I hope they got a good chuckle out of it.

My buddy Julie is always on the move. I met her through triathlon, and we blogged together for a while. I'd see her at races sometimes (zoom!) but we haven't had a nice in person chat for some time, excepting last night. In fact, our last serious chat was in 2010. (Actually that's a nice philosophical post, so if you are a new reader you might want to check it out.)

She has reason to care deeply about her hair, and when I offered to take some macro photos of it she got all excited. (It was that or all the good coffee.) We start with this, a normal, if somewhat unconventional portrait. She has really fine honey blonde hair, with a faint hint of red.

After coffee I got her leaning on my bike rack, which made her feel right at home. That was to make it easier to hold her hands still. After a few experiments figuring out exactly how to hold her hair we start zooming in.

This about 4x with extension tubes.

If I only saw this photo with no context I'd think it was a steel wire. Linda thought it might be the of a plant.

This is about 5x with extension tubes, so about 7x mag, maybe a bit more. On my Lightroom screen at 1:1 the individual hairs are about 10 mm in diameter, but in real life the individual hairs are too fine to measure with the tools at my disposal. Side to side we are looking at about 3mm of hair length.

This is the only shot that is cropped in. Rather than 6000 x 4000 px, this got cropped to 4163 x 2342 px because the rest of the hairs are badly out of focus. All of these are exported at 2048 px wide and 96 px/inch resolution so that social media doesn't mess them up. On my Lightroom screen at 1:1 these hairs are about 18 mm in diameter.

This one is actually Linda. It was a bit of a shared production. Linda had to sit with her head turned, and Julie had to hold the hair while I operated the camera.

This is the first time I've ever taken a macro shot of hair, and it's really the first time I've ever seen a magnified shot of hair. I was surprised at how translucent it is. There is just enough magnification to catch a hint of the texture. If there's a next time for doing this, I'd like to try doing a coil of hair. The trick will be to get it flat. Hmmm.

For those who want to know why Julie cares so much about her hair, (and to normal eyesight it is awesome hair!) drop me a note, and I'll put you in touch. She can explain better than me.