Extreme macro close shots?

[Mark Suszko]

If you can’t change lenses, would it work to just shoot thru one of those large page-size fresnel magnifiers you get at the drugstore for reading small type?

[Todd Terry]

Normally, you might be able to do this with a macro lens or even a front-of-lens screw-on closeup lens… but here we’re talking EXTREME closeup, if you are getting down to single-letter, or even portion of a letter.

To get that close, yes, I think you are talking microscopic photography.

However, rather than a microscope, I think by far the easier way to do it is to fake it. We’ve had to do this on a couple of occasions, most recently when a television commercial called for a closeup of a word in a dictionary.

We threw the dictionary on a scanner and made an extremely magnified scan of the tiny section of print that we needed. We then printed it out on a color laser printer… and that jumbo version was what we then photographed. The scan was able to retain the texture of the paper and the organic look of the ink on the page… but we were able to light the new print exactly like we wanted (it was kind of dramatic lighting with a light swhoosh right across the word) and make a gentle camera movement, which we would never have been able to do with the tiny “real” print.

If you can’t get a scan that big, then I think you’ll have to go back to microscopic photography. I’d shoot the bit under a microscope with an SLR that has a microscopic attachment, and use that shot to create a print for re-photographing, as above.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Jason Jenkins]

[Todd Terry] “We threw the dictionary on a scanner and made an extremely magnified scan of the tiny section of print that we needed.”

Or… that scan could be taken into After Effects and one could accomplish the same effect with 3D layers, lights, etc…

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!