journal features

reverse-mounting a lens

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2002.07.09

Today I made a wondrous discovery; reverse-lens photography.

if I hold my lens up to the mount of my camera backwards, so that the accessory threads are against the mount, I can take shots of things that are very tiny and very very close. I used my discovery to photograph the cracks in the skin of my knee, some pollen on flowers, and a tiny spider (which eluded me). I understand there are adapters for this sort of thing, so you don't have to hold the lens in place. I can't wait.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)