A bit smaller than camels in the Sahara, and much closer to home.

Playing around with my macro lens. The seed is from a small dandelion, and is only about 1/16" long. Backlit with my flash, the background is smooth foamcore. I love the transparency of the seed.

Strobist info: Vivitar 285HV flash about 18" away (in the obvious direction) on 1/4 power.

Playing around with my macro lens. This is a closeup of a Porsche ball point pen. The external mesh of the pen is the same material used for covering cables in the engine.

This is a closeup of an Aztec calendar laser cut into a piece of wood using an Epilog Laser. The face in the middle is about 3/8" across. I got this sample at the NAMM show, but TechShop in Menlo Park has one of the machines that members can use. I definitely want to get up to speed on this tool – you can use it on anything (TechShop was demoing it with tortillas at Maker Faire).

It’s always fun to play with power tools. I thought it would be interesting to catch the wood peeling out from a drill bit, but when I took the first shots of this on my drill press I discovered that the chips are much smaller than I thought and don’t really go that far. I had to jam the bit into the wood quickly and with a lot of force to create the explosion of pieces. This is not at all how you would want to bore a real hole.

The plum trees in our yard have been in full bloom for about a week now. The blossoms are small, maybe 3/4″ wide, and have a couple dozen stamens. I tried to focus just on the pollen at the end of the stamens (the ‘anther’).

A stack of CDs from my desk. A mix of music, programs and data.

Tomorrow I head down to the NAMM show in Anaheim. It’s one of the biggest music equipment shows and I’m prepping by shooting the tuners on my Taylor guitar.

With the heavy storms we’re going through I wanted to catch the rain in action. That was harder than I thought, so I set up in the garage instead.

This is a single drop into a glass bowl, lit from underneath with a flash. I took around 100 shots that I willowed down to this one.

Honey dripping off a spoon. Lit from the left with a strobe bounced off an umbrella.