Text and photos © 2009, David E. Perry.  All rights reserved.

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See these cool looking seeds (above)?  They really are a mahogany red color with purple highlights and tan colored parachutes, and they come from the naturally dried flowers on my Ligularia dentata (Othello) plants.  I’ve had three of these plants for several years now, but this is the first year that I actually collected the dried up flowers for seed in the fall, and so it is also the first time I’ve observed the complex architecture inherent within them.

I have been wanting to shoot them ever since breaking open a single flower head and discovering all that delicious color, three or four weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy, and lacking a properly rounded “To-It”.  So instead, I clipped the seedheads from the plants weeks back and saved them in a brown paper bag for a rainy day.  Like today.  Yep, perfectly rainy today.  Nearly all day.  In Seattle.  In November.  Go figure. 

So anyway, once I finally got freed up enough to set aside the time to picture them, I could easily have done so with one of my SLRs and oh, say, my 180mm macro lens.  (Love that lens.)  But, notice I said: ‘could have’.

Instead, because I sometimes just want that greater depth of field offered me through the physics of point and shoot cameras, I decided to act as if I were at play rather than work, figuring out then how to color outside the box by effectively shooting within one.

Behold friends, the “Point-and-Shoot Macro Photo Lightbox/Tripod Substitute Combo.”  We could name it the PSMPLTSC, for short, which would certainly score us some hard to come by “Bonus Nerd Points”.  Or we could forego the nerd points and simply call it by its common name, a wide-mouth pint Mason jar (see below).

Pretty frighteningly high tech looking, huh? 

Well, you know me.  I’m all about making life as complicated and unattainable as possible for as many as possible.  I figure it makes me seem ever so much more intimidating that way. 

So here’s how this shot went down:

Put a bunch of Ligularia dentata seeds into a one pint, wide mouth Mason jar.  Turn camera on.  Press the little flower icon on the back of the camera to set it to close-up (macro) mode.  Place the camera face down on that same, seed-holding mason jar and depress the shutter release button just enough to get the camera to focus.  Turn on the lamp (I needed a lamp in this case because it was almost dark outside, but really, you could just as well use overcast daylight, or brilliant sunlight.), and tilt the shade slightly toward the “Point-and-Shoot Macro Photo Lightbox/Tripod Substitute Combo.”    Preview your image in the screen on the back of the camera, looking deliberately at all four corners of the frame.  Move the setup toward and away from the light until you get the lighting effect that pleases you and shows your subject to its best advantage, and further, move the camera within the jar’s generous opening to help compose the image as you see fit.  Lift the camera carefully off the jar to adjust the seeds if you need to, using a spoon, or a chopstick, or your finger, pressing them down, or fluffing them up until you have the elements in your shot arranged in such a way that it pleases your eye.  You should also be able to utilize the zoom feature on your  camera for limited adjustments, as well.  Once you’ve made any desired adjustments and framed up your shot, press the camera downward, onto the rim of the glass jar while depressing the shutter button.  The rigidity of the glass will keep the camera precisely distant, relative to the subject during your exposure, meaning that your pictures should be extra crispy sharp.

You may add a plastic cutting sheet (as I have above), or instead, put the want ads from the newspaper to work, or enlist the white envelope that that latest piece of junk mail came in to serve as a reflector, softening the shadows by placing it either behind or beside the Mason jar to bounce light back into the image from another angle.  Or, if you decide you need to diffuse the light from your lamp to soften the shadows place it instead between the lamp and the jar.  You’ll be able to see the effects right away in the screen.


See how easy that was?

And to think, you could just as easily have a caterpillar in that jar, or a piece of bark, or a flower, or a brussels sprout, or  the underside of a chanterelle mushroom, or a cricket, or a poor dead bird, or a couple of owl pellets, or coyote poop . . . or a dry fly on a twig, or really, almost anything.  So, if you don’t have a tripod handy, or if you don’t have one small enough to allow you to get in really close to your subject, consider the humble Mason jar.  It allows in light, it holds your camera in alignment while you watch the screen on the back and move the jar in and out, away from the light, to achieve your desired look and effect.  And when it is finally time to shoot, it will hold the camera steady at a precisely fixed distance from your subject as you press the shutter release, free from flutter-inducing breezes and hand-held camera wiggle.  This is an extremely portable and utterly reproducible solution.  Think about it.  Try it. 

Now, consider posting up your best, single “Point-and-Shoot Macro Photo Lightbox/Tripod Substitute Combo” shot below, by attaching it to your explanatory comment in the ‘comments’ section.   I bet you can think of some pretty groovy pictures that could be taken just this way.  I hereby encourage you to put a little extra jam on your toast tomorrow so you can hurry up and empty that jar.  We’ve got some playing to do as soon as you get it washed out. 

So, what will you put in yours to shoot?