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Today was the first Magic tournament of the season at Ockanickon and it was nice to catch up with the staff members that perennially help. Dave Scherr was still Commander Giggles and Sean Applegate was still a skilled apiarist as proved by the following:

Sean: Terry.
Me: Yes?
Sean: I had a swarm split the other day.
Me: What’s that involve?
Sean: You have to get the groups of bees to split off so that there’s enough space between the queens for the workers to not go nuts.
Me: How do you do that?
Sean: I put the bees in a box and moved them to a new hive. If you get enough bees in one spot they kind of flow over each other into a river of bees.

A river of bees. That’s a level of Dante’s Inferno, I think.

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Reverse mounting a lens is a common practice for giving macro capabilities and I wanted to give it a try in the wild but doing so can be somewhat tricky as the lens itself often gets in the way as the focal distance is measured in millimeters.  This is what I got from a standard reverse mounted 50mm lens.

20100911-3901-HDR-MacroChurchville The wider the lens, the more dramatic the macro effect becomes but the more light is required and the thinner the plane of focus.

20100911-3958-HDR-MacroChurchville

At a full 17mm at f/4.0, the focal plane was thinner than I could make out with my eye.

The longer the focal length of the regular lens the weaker the macro effect is, which can be good when you want more distance to work with a la:

20100911-3992-HDR-MacroChurchville BEES!

The variable focal distance could lead to some odd cases like geometry such that the plane of focus was inside the lens.  200mm and focused at 4 feet near f/11 led to a depth of field thick enough for actual pictures of things.

20100911-3928-HDR-MacroChurchville YOU CAN MAKE OUT BOTH SIDES OF THE PETAL!