This is a bit of a change from the spate of flower pictures I have been sharing recently, though I guess if you squint real hard you could possibly mistake it for a kind of blooming plant of some sort. While I’m not in the habit of using Weekly Fifty for some kind of photographic guessing game, I am curious to know what you thought this was when you first saw it. Some kind of composite image, perhaps? Maybe a bit of photoshopping to embellish an ornament? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought there was some level of AI-induced trickery going on, but I can assure you the real answer is much more simple, and instead of artificial image-generating algorithms you’re looking at a combination of light and physics–plain and simple or, perhaps one might say, elegant and profound. It all depends on your point of view, but at the end of the day this image is completely real and captured entirely in camera. It’s a glass sphere sitting on top of a multicolored fidget spinner my son brought home from school:
I bought the sphere at the suggestion of my brother Phil a few months ago, and while I don’t use it every single day I do enjoy seeing the different kinds of creative opportunities it affords. In this situation I think the fidget spinner itself would make for a compelling photo, but the sphere sitting on top of it elevated the composition to a new level that I find to be pretty compelling. The trickiest part of this shot wasn’t depth of field, as often is the case when shooting with my macro lens, but shutter speed. I gave the spinner a flick with my finger and then took several shots of it as it slowed down, and was continually surprised at how difficult it was to capture a sense of motion without turning the shot into nothing more than just a blur.
What you see here is a half-second shutter, but that by itself doesn’t tell much of a story. A half second doesn’t mean anything without knowing how fast the object you are photographing is moving, and in this case I can assure you the answer was slowly. Very slowly. The spinner had, by the time I took this photo, slowed to what I guess you could describe as a crawl or, in other words, barely moving at all. I tried this several times (flicking the spinner, taking lots of photos) and each time the slower it got the more I was surprised at just how slow it really needed to turn to get the shot I was aiming for. I could have just used a shorter shutter with a faster rotation, but that would have required a higher ISO to compensate and I’m really happy with the ISO 400 I was able to use here–it results in a crisp, clean, noise-free image that does just about everything I wanted it to do.
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