Sunday, August 12, 2007

The Glow - or what an old Xray Lens can do....


Today I tested my new adaptor which allowed me to mount that old f0.75 50mm Xray lens to my camera. So I wondered if it would be able to take UV shots also with that big hunk of glass (which, by theory should not be expected...).

That lens has no built in aperture, so all shots were taken at f0.75 with the resulting extremely shallow depth of field.

Target was again a Mexican Zinna. Here now some shots straight from the camera and the reason why I called it THE GLOW:




And indeed there is UV in that shot, but also IR, since I used no filter in front of the lens and the light source was a Nikon SB-140 equipped with SW-5UV filter.




UV fluorescence getsalso visible which shows the pollen and makes some fuzz and spider webs visible. The following shot has been balanced to bring out the natural color of the flower and this now shows clearly the UV pattern of that flower.




IR finally looks like that, filtered through some IR transmitting glass in front of the lens.




Stay tuned, more will follow on that fascinating subject...

More info on this very interesting field may be found on my site http://www.pbase.com/kds315/uv_photos>