Island in the Net

Around the last year of graduate school I came down with the “sniffles”. For weeks I had itchy, watery eyes, a stuffy nose and I sneezed almost incessantly. It was impacting my school work and my friend insisted I take a trip to the school’s medical center. I was shocked to when she told me that I had seasonal allergies. I grew up in the West Indies. I never heard of anyone who had allergies to anything.

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By: Khürt Williams – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Every I get the sneezing, nasal itch and drooling, itchy eye watering, “sniffly” allergies. I love the Spring but hate my bodies reaction to it. That doesn’t stop me from doing what I love. Walking outdoors enjoying nature coming to life after many months of dreary grey. Of course I pay for it later.

The building grounds crew were clipping off low hanging branches from the trees right outside the entrance. I asked and they cut off a small bunch for me to take.

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By: Khürt Williams – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I set up a small “desktop studio” using two sheets of 11×14″ paper. One sheet was laid flat on the desk and the other was set against the wall of the cubicle. The branch was placed on the paper and illuminated from directly above the fluorescent light installed at the desk.

I had a lot of trouble securing the iPhone. I wanted to make sure focusing was as sharp as possible. This was challenging giving the shallow depth of field of the macro lenses. I didn’t have a tripod so I improvised. I stuck a bent business card into the slot in my Kenu car iPhone holder. After a great deal of trial and error I was able to get the setup stabalized. I used the digital zoom feature of Camera+ to check that my focus was as sharp as possible. Just to be sure, I used the 5 second shutter timer on Camera+ to reduce any possible camera shake when I tapped the on-screen shutter release.

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By: Khürt Williams – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The following set of images were taken with the Olloclip 10X and 15X macro lens attachments for the iPhone 5. The images were exported to the iOS camera roll¹ and then imported into Photogene to remove a scratch on my iPhone lens². Once the scratch was removed, the images were exported to Flickr. This was to ensure I had a backup of the images before moving on. I then did another export to the iOS camera roll and imported images into Mextures.

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By: Khürt Williams – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In Mextures I applied some of the formulas from the Summer Formula’s pack to create the final result. What do you think of the results?

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