The crew over at photoassignment.net shot details this week. Here was the assignment, from their site:

Photos of aesthetically interesting details of anything, big or small, organic or not, but which at first sight doesn’t make the viewer recognize what they are part of.

Check out a few of the best after the jump.

I was really impressed by the quality of the images in this week’s assignment - all the shooters on Photoassignment seem to be quite adept at macro photography. Pedro Pinheiro’s image of the spiral plant that led off this article shows nice, subtle lighting technique and a cool allusion to the shape of a DNA molecule. The technique he used wasn’t cheap.

I took this photo with the Canon EOS 5D and a Canon EF 85 f/1.8, ST-E2 emitter, and a 550EX flash from the left with a Lumiquest portable softbox.

That’s about $3500 worth of equipment right there. But contrast that with Pinheiro’s next shot, taken with a budget digital camera with a piece of tissue paper over the flash to diffuse the light.

It’s interesting that Pinheiro was able to produce great light with both expensive and budget kit. To be sure, the photograph of the plant would have been a lot more difficult to take without the more expensive, off-camera flash, but there are still a lot of different ways to light an image well with just a point-and-shoot digital camera.

Nuno Correia’s shot of his bicycle tire shows a nice subtle control as well and does perhaps the best job of living up to the assignment’s instructions that the subject not be immediately obvious on first glance. I like that both Correia and Pinheiro used black as the background color in their images. Isolating a macro object against a white background is the cliched - and easier - technique, and I think a black background can be more impacting.

This week’s assignment is stillness.

Represent in any way the concept of Stillness, to be still. Something not being disturbed by any means.

As always, you are invited to follow along with the assignment, posting your results to the Cheapshooter.com Flickr Group. I’ve started threads in the group to discuss both this week’s results and some ideas on how to illustrate stillness. Please join in, and add any macro photos of your own into the pool.

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