Macro Monday – string of red beads

It is no secret I am Polish. It makes my life a bit difficult when I need to purchase Christmas tree. I do not set it up, like most Americans, before Thanksgiving. No, I think about buying it a week before Christmas and put it up on Christmas Eve. Can you imaging how hard it is to find a Christmas tree in Iowa two days before Christmas? Luckily, this year, with a help from a friend, we got lucky.

Anyway, since we set it up late, we take it down even later. Most of our neighbors are already taking down their Christmas decorations. My tree will probably be here till the end of Carnival. Unless, since it is live, it starts loosing needles.

This gives me a fantastic object to even more fun with Christmas tree images. This time, I took out my macro lens. I was photographing in early afternoon, thus you can see two light sources reflecting in the beads- warm light from holiday lights and blue daylight. It was a really difficult task to adjust white balance on this image.

I shot it on the tripod, obviously- take a look at how long shutter speed I needed for moderate aperture of f/11. It gives actually quite shallow depth of field in the macro image- which I wanted. I wanted to exaggerate the perspective and show the length of the string. Putting the string on diagonal let me create a more dynamic, interesting image, as if I needed more to this bright red color.

I will post few more of the Christmas tree macros in the following weeks, so stay tuned.