Pixles

This work by Adam M is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

A close up of the LCD screen of my computer. The
red blue and green stripes are the individual parts that make up white. The out of focus region has been exaggerated, to show the colours mixing.

Pentax K-x - 1/125 sec - f/0 - ISO 800 - ~ Unknown focal length

Subject was backlit, because that's how LCD screens work.

Used GIMP to crash the computer repeatedly (old laptop) until I thought to scale for web before doing the computationally heavy filter and gradient. I adjusted levels (scaled), duplicated the layer, used Gaussian blur to exaggerate the already out of focus parts of the image. Added layermask, used radial gradient to make the middle section transparent, showing through to the in-focus, unblurred part of the original image. Finally, added the watermark.

I think I used a 28-80mm lens on the camera, with a 50mm lens held in reverse in front of it. This probably gave me between 1:1 and 1:2 times magnification. I think. I was trying different lenses for this, but judging by the size of the pixels, this is what I used for this picture. Because the two lenses weren't terribly well lined up (hand held) the plane of focus was rather shifty, and I couldn't get a photo with everything in focus. I learned later that the magnification achieved using one lens mounted, one lens reversed is Fm/Fr times, where Fm is the focal length of the mounted lens and Fr is the focal length of the reversed lens. So a narrow mounted lens, and a wide reversed lens gives higher magnification. Future work on this principle will involve higher magnifications and a more stable set up.