Rock

On a thoroughly wet day I decided to stay indoors and practice my macro technique mess about. This is a close-up of a pebble collected from a beach on Iona many years ago. They used to quarry marble there at one time, and I thought it might be marble.

It took some time to get my flash working with focus stacking. Two of the essential settings were rather obscure, and in the end I had to read the manual :-(. It was harder than I expected to get oblique lighting on a small object with the flash - either the light was flat (as here) or part of the rock was completely dark. I'll have to think some more.

 Other lessons learnt:
(a) I can't judge sharpness by looking at the camera screen,
(b) the cheap Rollei-branded mini-tripod I bought isn't just useless for some things, it's useless for everything.

See the extra for a shot of my setup. It works reasonably well, although I have no idea if it is optimal. The table top tripod shown here isn't the rubbish one, but an FLM one that I'm very pleased with.