Interesting week ahead! I just wrapped an exhausting 4 day advanced macro seminar that was a great deal of fun and fun of opportunities and challenges. Opportunities and challenges that translate into interesting content for the channel, to be sure. The first Challenge was my need to put together a fully functional, sturdy vertical macro platform at the start of the course. I was not expecting to need it, but on Friday night with only 12 hours to go before we started, that all changed…

In the course of six frenetic hours I built and tested a high magnification vertical rig for use in the course. Not only did it get finished, but it was done without having to order or purchase a single thing. The whole rig was made using scrap materials from around the shop. Tonight I will walk you through the build and give you tips and pointers on hw to build your own and also give you detailed information how to use it at high magnification. How high, you ask…

And so was born the topic for Thursdays Macro Talk Too livestream - a mini review and primer on using very high magnification optics in macro photography. Should be a lot of fun!

Tuesday’s livestream is here - https://youtube.com/live/T6ARIFERnjQ?feature=share

and Thursday’s is here - https://youtube.com/live/A11LKVHrIcw?feature=share

So what about the sand? That was some very cool garnet sand, brought to the workshop by the same cool individual, Dennis H. Miller, who left me with his 100x na0.7 Mitutoyo for a few days of testing - this is going to be a lot of fun!

This is a non-Pzoom weekend, but don’t forget the next weekend has a Pzoom at 10Am followed by the Tangent 3D printing livestream at 12:30. More coming soon!

That’s all for now - hope to see you this evening!