I really enjoy macro photography and for some time I was looking for an interesting subject for that. This week when I had some free time the weather was awful, so I decided to figure out something indoors 🙂 I’ve got a few ideas for a macro timelapse, but this time I go with making carmel.
This is a shot from my 52 Timelapse Project. You can check out the details of the project or full list of the shots.
As always, it was harder than I thought. The basic problem was to melt the sugar properly (not just to make carmel, but you have to make it look good). Finally it took me 5 tries of melting 😉 I tried also different colors of the pots. At first, I used the black one, sugar looks nice on black surface, but melted sugar doesn’t look that good 😉 The brown color of the carmel was not visible, so I tried white background. Now, the sugar was looking bad (I wanted a little bit more contrast on that, not everything just white). Finally I go with silver pot, which also has a thicker bottom, which is good for the carmel 😉
I don’t have a macro lens. Here’s the example how to do it really cheap 😉 In the picture above you can see my setup. It’s a combination of two popular macro accesories – filter and extension tubes. I used vintage 50mm M42 lens (which I bought for about 120$). The extension tubes for that are super cheap, because it’s a fully manual lens (I got that for free with some lens). Usually I mount M42 lenses using a speedbooster to my GH4, but in this case it would decrease the magnification, so I used a simple micro 4/3 to M42 adapter (about 15$). On the lens I mounted Marumi macro filter. I have no idea what magnification this combo has, but it’s quite good for me 🙂
Macro photographers always struggle with too shallow depth of field. For a still shot you can use focus stacking, but in timelapse it’s not that easy. I used fully closed aperture (f/16 for this lens) to enlarge the depth of field, ISO 200 and 1/30 sec of shutter speed. Of course the camera was on a tripod. For safety reasons I pointed a fan at my camera, because it was really close to the sugar and it was hot there 😉 The camera worked fine, so I consider this solution good enough (probably it would work without a fan too, but who cares, safety first!).
Do you like this technique? Check out my Timelapse tutorial!
It’s my 10th shot for this project! It’s almost 20% of the project 🙂 I hope you like what I publish every week. You can join me on my Facebook page or in Timelapse, Hyperlapse and Stop-Motion Facebook group. See you next week!
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