Macro Snap
More from the Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens that I rented. To find out more about the lens look at the first of these posts.
This is a clothing snap fastener. It is 9mm in diameter in real life. This is both halves snapped together which you can’t really tell, except it pushes the springs a bit towards the outer perimeter where they are hooked beneath the small ball that is sitting inside the bulbous axis in this view.
There is a lot of interesting detail in this object that one would never see under normal circumstances. It is an ingenious little mechanism and I can’t really imagine the machine that must exist to make these small things. I suppose that the miniaturization of machinery for mass producing these kinds of things in the first half of the 19th century probably made possible the much greater miniaturization of the electronic circuit boards and so on later in the century.
This object, with its shiny metal surfaces has some very interesting optical artifacts, a couple of which I have cropped and enlarged below, but which you can easily see on the shot above as well. Little explosive bokeh rainbows. All the crops are the same size (about 125%) from the same image, a variant of the one above with a different focal point. Some of them show off my dusty sensor too which I did not clean up.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x Macro Lens, ISO100, f-8, 1/13th top and crops, 1/40th second image.
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burnt embers 
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Sorry about the multiple likes (though I DID like it a lot!) – iPad wasn’t responding well 🙂
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I like likes, so no problem with lots of likes
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These are great. I love the way the fractured bits of light show in a multitude of color in these macro images. What to us is a glossy sheen is truly proven to be bits of colored light.
And what an amazing thought – that the manufacture of snap buttons led to the micro manufacturing of computer bits. Oh, how the littlest things may have changed the world.
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It is so neat the way the light is broken up in these images. Something had to come before computers to make them possible – why not clothing fasteners? They were quite revolutionary in their time, and now are nearly supplanted by velcro.
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Some of these remind e of photos I’ve seen from the Hubble telescope. I guess there’s not much difference between inner space and outer space. Very interesting series. More!!!
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Ha! Indeed. I’ve always though the universe at large looked eerily similar to the universe in miniature.
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Hi Ken and Ryan – there is a fascinating book of photographs that is a mix of microscopic and telescopic images, called Heaven & Earth: Unessen by the Naked Eye. It is worth looking for in your local library or second hand. It’s a fascinating compilation of photographs of the tiny and the immense, and so many of the pictures have so many similarities. We own a copy but I have not looked at it for many years – your comments have spurred my to go find it and have a look. Why I did not think of it earlier I have no idea.
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