Easy Macro Photography

I couldn't find the circuit board picture I wanted among those available online so I had to shoot my own showing off the LEDs.

When describing how to Blink the OK LED I wanted an image that was mostly horizontal with the lights on and oriented as they appear to me with cables running out of either side of the board.

I used the camera in my iPhone 4.

I shot through a close-up adapter lens built into an elastic band to attach it to the phone. website

I used a desk lamp positioned within a few inches. This blurred shadows and balanced board and LED.

I turned on HDR mode. This takes multiple exposures and mixes them to capture the still high contrast scene.

I balanced my phone against my finger on my desk to hold it still. I wanted sharp.

I let the phone's auto-focus do its thing. It had to be close.

I took five or six pictures before I got one I liked. I tried many positions of the light.

I emailed the good picture to myself, medium resolution. I'd change that later.

Many of the later steps were accommodations for the simple-minded image handling in federated wiki. Large images slow the loading of page JSON which contains the image in Radix-64 format. Every edit of an image caption duplicates the caption and the image data in the Journal.

I edited the picture in Preview to tune the cropping, exposure, contrast and sharpness.

I reduced the image size and saved it with high compression.

I opened a scratch federated wiki page and dropped the image there.

I edited the caption to be both short and useful.

I dragged the image to the destination page.