MPJ

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene not farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. While ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose. But, can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like top of the pencil, as close as couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo: Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took above photo with only my smartphone, addi...

People are asking me these days what is "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself into entire story of our pioneer film making project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play - it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series' so in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into real short movie and after little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious. In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor a...

The year was 1975 when I was browsing small dusty workshop located next to the garage within our house backyard. It was perfect combination, I was about to turn 7 years old, eager to explore the darkest corner of my childhood realm and the dark workshop was the most mysterious chamber in our entire family estate, no bigger than four cubic meters occupied with heavy and old greenish oak cabinet with couple of drawers and compartments filled with tons of different tools, mechanical devices and various interesting stuff I didn't know their origin and purpose. It was, more or less, the year when I started to break things in order to find out what was inside or to find how something works, foolishly believing that I would be perfectly able to put things together back. Well, from this point of view in time, I can't remember if there was at least one mechanical device I "inspected" in such manner that I successfully restored after unscrewing all the bolts and junctures...

In the past shooting close-up images was in the area of true professionals. It required expensive equipment and large SLR photo cameras with special lenses capable of taking photos in true 1:1 ratio. In simple words it means that the object you are photographing appears in the same size in camera's sensor as in real life. Well, contrary to what we might think today with all those cheap compact and digital SLR photo cameras to take truly astonishing photo of amazing micro world it still requires not so cheap lenses and matching specially designed flashes. Nikon P500 in 'action' However, new digital photo world in its 'blooming' era in previous decade brought something else to the scene. Something equally important and with quality far beyond we used to in previous 'analog' world. Actually, two new things are introduced in the business - computerization of the camera and large worldwide competition between leading manufacturers. First one brought simp...