A NEW TOY – NANOZOOM
I recently bought a nifty little gadget for my phone – a Nanozoom. This is a 200x microscope lens that you clip onto the phone in order to take extreme magnification photos. I had to fiddle around with it a bit in order to line it up on the primary photo lens on my phone, and found the best way was to clip it on at the side of the phone. After charging, the device has an adjustable brightness LED light; I found this did produce a bit of a halo on the picture but I may be able to overcome this with practice.
The square part slides up and down the frame, so that you can align it exactly over the camera lens.
My fun photos
I went around the rooms looking for ordinary things to photograph. Some of the results were quite surprising. I’ll put the labels underneath each photo – see if you can identify them before scrolling down to see the labels!
Kitchen paper. This kitchen roll has embossing in a circular design on it but you cannot see the overall pattern at this magnification; only the embossed circles that make up the design.
The first of two photos I took of a coaster with a picture of a duck on it. You can see the outline of some of the feathers, and also the pixels of the photo, which make an interesting texture.
Here’s the second photo of the same coaster, selecting a different area of the picture.
Your guess is as good as mine on this one – for the moment I can’t remember at all what this was!! If I remember, I will edit this post with the details.
My green striped kitchen apron.
Carved wooden box.
Orchid leaf.
The first of two photos of my nylon kitchen chopping board. Here’s the second one:
Bread! Amazing, isn’t it. Here’s another shot of the same slice, taken to include the crust. You can see how the bubbles are more squashed towards the edge of the slice.
Kitchen sponge. It looks quite similar to the bread, but I know which I would prefer to eat, given the choice.
Nylon kitchen pot scourer.
Towel.
Black fabric – the top I was wearing on the day. This was taken straight-on, showing that the garment was cut on the cross, producing the diagonal woven pattern. Not sure what the fabric is, but it is synthetic.
Did you guess any of them? Things do look entirely different at high magnification.
Inspiration for art
Apart from this being a really fun and interesting toy, I thought I might be able to use photos of objects as inspiration for art and texture. It certainly makes you look at things slightly differently, wondering what they would look like at really close range!
