It’s Gizmodo Australia Shooting Challenge prize time! There are some amazing photos in this bunch of Macro and Zoom entries, and we’ve selected the last finalist to go head to head in the final round! Check out these entries!
Prizes
Back once again with a brand new prize: this time you’re playing for the awesome Nokia Lumia 1020: the best Lumia yet.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 is a mobile photographer’s dream.
The 1020 packs a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 4G capabilities and a 4.5-inch 1280×768 screen with 332 ppi. It’s a gorgeous device, but the real party piece comes when you turn the phone around.
There, you’ll find a 41-megapixel PureView camera: technology we thought could only belong in a lab, let alone on a phone you can slip easily into your pocket. The camera is the 1020′s main event, and boy is it quite a trick.
We’re giving away the Lumia 1020 handset, valued at $899, as well as the incredible Camera Grip Pro attachment, valued at $89.95, which not only turns the Lumia 1020 into a convenient everyday shooter, but also includes a spare battery to charge you up on a long day snapping.
It’s exciting to be able to give one Nokia Lumia 1020 away to the Shooting Challenge faithful over the next three weeks (one round per week). The prize pack you’re playing for is valued in total at $988.95.
Who Won The First Round?
Ben Appleton
I usually always take my DSLR and tripod to Floriade Nightfest, however this year i decided to go with a group of friends so i just took my small Sony RX100 point and shoot. I didnt take many photos, but I was really happy with this photo.
I really like using the RX100 because it has an aperture of f1.8 and is my favourite point and shoot for low light photography.
I didnt have a tripod with me so the photo was taken whilst hand holding the camera. I used a 1/8th of a second exposure and an ISO of 3200.
It was nice to be able to hang out with a bunch of friends that i dont often get to see but still get to take a few photos. If I had a new Nokia Lumia 1020, I wouldnt need to carry a separate camera to my phone!
Congratulations! You’re in the final! You’ll be going up against the next two finalists for the coveted Nokia Lumia 1020!
Check out this week’s Macro and Zoom entries and help put someone through to the next round!
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Ashley Adams
Canon 60D
Canon 100mm L series
ISO-400
f/3.5
1/320secPlaying around with my manual focus I found this 4cm Baby Fern Bush just starting out with a life expectancy of a couple of weeks with my brother and sister around always playing with this damn bush.
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Laurens
Hypoblemum albovittatum jumping spider resting on a Nasturtium flower.
Shot with an Iphone 4 using camera+, (only editing was a little cropping) and a homemade macro lens made by salvaging the glass from a pair of cheapo Australian Geographic binouclars from a Good Sammys, they are chock full of lenses that have slightly differing properties with the added advantage depending on how you mount them to your phone of being able to use the phone’s light source to take macros at night, even with the iphone’s poor low light abilities. (as opposed to Olloclips etc) If your are interested you can hit up this tag on Instagram #kinestesiamacrolens for the setup (look for the earliest image)
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Siang Lim
I was carrying my daughter when inspiration struck to take a few shots of her Moses basket, rather than the usual plant/flower/insect close ups.
This is probably the fifth shot (taking a photo with one hand is hard) and I like how the image turned out, from the focal point to the colour tone. This photo was taken at night with my mobile. A table lamp provided most of the light.
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Michael
Been a while since i’ve entered so i thought i better get my act together! i’ve Always wanted to get a photo of a dragonfly but they’re just so damn quick! this one eventually played nice for me so i’m pretty happy i got a usable photo out of it!
24-105mm with extension tube
5D mII
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Daryll Moore
Was out at the Blue Mountains on Saturday 05/10/13 and found this guy on the pathway about to be devoured by ants, so put him back into a bush.
Had my Canon 7D on hand using a 50mm Canon macro lens took the photo at f10, 1/100sec, no exp bias and iso 1250. Didn’t need my tripod.
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Conor Macfarlane
Every time we talk with someone face to face, it’s each others eyes that we look into. And you may describe someone’s eyes as beautiful, but it’s not until you get this close can you realise how much of an understatement that is.
They are not only beautiful, but fascinatingly intricate, incredibly complicated, and absolutely magnificent.
We often miss the trees for the forest, but hopefully, by looking at this photograph, you’ll be able to appreciate how truly resplendent these little gifts are.Canon 650D, 50mm f1.4, Kenko extension tubes, and a Canon 320EX flash. And a tripod.
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Joshua Bennett
Used a Canon EOS 450D, with a 50mm Lens + Extensions. The extensions I used were +1, +4 and +2 from the japan optics collection. ISO set at 200 and no flash.
I used the “P” mode on the camera and used the lens in manual focus.
The funny thing is I didnt realise there was a dragonfly before taking the photo. I bent down to try and take a photo of a flower bud in my garden but a lizard started to rustle a bush and I jumped. My camera went out of focus so I decided to practice on a random twig to get it into focus. As I went to take the photo, the dragonfly appeared and I adjusted accordingly. Definately not intended, but was one of the best photos I took today.
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Owen Dower
i used lg nexus 4 to take the photo set on iso 100
i was out having a coffee in Melbourne and some beautiful flowers across the road caught my eye, i knew i had to take a picture of them
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Jeff Z
Our laundry is in the corner of the house with a tiny tiny window. On the ledge, while i was fixing a tap, i saw a fly stuck under layers of cobwebs and the spider itself had died. The sunlight on the cobwebs made it to seem like a nice resting place for the unfortunate fly, sort of like a grave.
I used a Nikon P90 Superzoom (not as flexible as other DSLRs) because it was the only camera i could find. I used manual settings:
F/stop : f/5
Shutter : 1/20s
ISO : 64
Focal length (manual focus) : 26mm
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Dennis
A photo of the face of an old stray cat. It is very affectionate so much so that taking a photo close up of its face required rubbing its belly constantly so it would lie down and be still for a moment.
Picture taken with a Pentax Q with 01 Prime Lens, Scene Mode Macro, ISO 125, f 2.8, exposure 1/640.
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Jason Roberts
Wonderbelly. A bug in plastic…
My 4 year old has a collection of bugs in resin. This one is an Emerald Beetle, it’s his favourite, so I thought I would take some macro photos for him to look at in detail. The bug itself is about 3cm and really colourful. I stood the resin block with the bug inside on a piece of A4 paper to give it a white background and took a bunch of shots with my wife’s Canon PowerShot A650iS (ISO-200, f/8, 1/20 sec exposure) and 2 desk-lamps as light sources, moving them in different positions to get different colours to show up. The colours haven’t been altered, but I did gamma correct the image as I deliberately overexposed it a bit to get all the colours to “pop” 🙂
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Rowan Hendrie
Fireworks – taken with a NEX-6 &16-50 zoom lens, ISO100, 1/4 shutter speed @ F/11. The camera was stabilised on a wall, and a timer was used to allow me to get into position.
This was my son’s first trip to his grandparents hometown in Okayama, Japan, and the first time he’d met his grandfather. We bought little firecrackers at the local chemist and lit them to watch his reaction, just after sunset and before his bedtime. I don’t remember sleeping well that night.
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Cathy Willmot
Shooting summary: Canon EOS 7D; Sigma 50-200mm zoom lens; ISO 400; f stop 5.6
Story: I loved Dandelions as a child, growing up in the country, we must have been responsible for the propagation of thousands of these as we picked them carefully, and blew the seeds to the wind (much to our parent’s despair!). Walking to a friend’s place today, I spied a Dandelion which had a heart shape in its core where the seeds had already blown away, and had the distinct feeling that the love is mutual!
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Bruce Thomson
We had some friends drive 7 hours to visit us in Central Queensland for the long weekend, and thought we’d show them some of the touristy type things to do, so took them to the gem fields. Whilst they were doing an underground tour, we bought a couple of buckets of wash for them to scour through. I thought this would be a good time to test out the my new Lumia 1020, messing with the ISO and focal point, and this turned up, better than I could have expected. This is the low res image, un-adulterated. With the high res image, the level of detail is incredible. You can crop to the image to be full screen on the centre quartz rock to almost full screen. Suffice to say my wife is so impressed she wants one… Badly! So, please Giz voters, gimme the new phone so I can get her off my back!
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Tony Paterson
I took this hand-held macro photograph with my trusty Lumix Panasonic DMC TZ-1, using the auto-bracketing feature at 1/3 stop. I wanted to document the beauty but scourge of the introduced species Lantana, before I attempt to eradicate this plant, one of Australia’s most debilitating invasive weeds, from my property in SE QLD.
Lantana camara (lantana) is a scrambling or thicket-forming shrub originating from tropical South and Central America. It was first introduced to Australia in the 1840s as an ornamental garden plant. It has become highly invasive in both agricultural and natural ecosystems and now covers over 5% of the Australian land mass. It poses a serious threat to the survival of numerous plant and animal species, as well as ecological communities.
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Deb Yarrow
UNSC Marine is no match for this Covenant Elite Commando in a closeup encounter in the jungle!
I’ve been meaning to make an image with toys for aaages, they are so much fun, thanks for the perfect opportunity gizmodo!
Sony a65, Tamron 90mm macro, sony off camera wireless flash, sunlight for backlight, potplant with weird succulents in flower for the set. Shot at ISO200, f8, 1/3200.
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Lee Liew
Some fallen spines were gathered and arranged in a pot to look like a menacing alien octopus creature. The lifeless dry nature of the razor sharp spines with spiders web contrasts with the blurred lush green inviting foliage in the background.
Camera: Sony Nex 5N
Lens: 18-200mm
Settings: 1/250, f/10, ISO-400, 78mm
Hand held, zoomed in and taken in broad daylight.
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Matt Byers
Nikon D5000
f/5.6
1/125s
ISO: 200Shot with a 200mm stock lens and a 50mm prime lens attached in reverse to the front. Yongnuo flash in a home made flash holder made of spare wood, screws and velcro, to keep the flash near the front of the lens.
I was laying in the grass for a few hours practising on focusing and lining up shots with my Macro set up. There were a few bugs out but as usual by the time you get comfortable, line up the shot and then move in close enough to get it in focus, the bug would get bored and bugger off. Out of 400 shots I got 8 that were worth keeping, out of those 8 I got 3 that were worth showing around. This is one of the better ones that I am happy with.
A lot of the shots were attempts to try focus stacking (none of which worked)
Adjustments to contrast and exposure was done in photoshop before saving as Jpeg.
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Luc Howard
Every day I walk past a group of plum trees on my street. With the morning light shining through their leaves they look otherworldly; almost too vivid to be real. This shot was taken up through a leaf, revealing the inner structure. I used a Sony NEX7, a set of dodgy macro-tubes, and a Zeiss 50/2 ZM set to f11 to get the shot. I had a great deal of difficulty staying still enough to focus on the area of the leaf I wanted to focus on.
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Christopher Cameron
Canon 6D, Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro 2.8, iso 100, 1/1000s
I was dying to try to learn how to take a decent macro photo of a bee for months. First dry sunny day in melbourne – I showed off my plumbers crack to half of busy kings way in some kind of Twister disaster pose for 2 hours trying to get a bee to sit still for 1/1000th of a second. I may have pretended my speedlite was a speed camera flash here and there for fun.
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Avon Perera
Canon 600D
Lens: Canon 100mm macro
f/8
1/500s
ISO 640This was a last minute lunch-time stalking in the bushes just outside the office. Luckily this little guy decided to sit still and pose for me. I love how interesting bugs can be up close. The detail on the back of this little guy is just incredible. Much more interesting than their faces IMO
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Marin Bacon
Canon 500D with EF24-70 f2.8
50mm f1.8 in handUsing a tripod to secure the camera with manual focus i tried a few times to get the second lens lined up so that the Raspberry Pi was in focus.
it was harder than i thought
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Laurence Tuchin
The waves were really small on Wednesday (2nd Oct) however I decided to take out my camera (Nikon D7000) and Aquatech camera housing (to allow me to shoot in the water) and get some surf photos. I decided to shoot at a higher aperture than normal, f6.3, which lets more of the wave be in focus. The waves were around 0.5-1ft and I was shooting approximately 50-100cm from the wave.
Shooting details:
Nikon D7000
Nikon 50mm f1.4G
Aquatech NY-7000 housing
f/6.3
Exposure 1/1250
ISO-200
Time taken says 11:50am however I think the camera around 2hrs too fast.
Thanks for viewing 🙂
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Stuart Addelsee
Zip it!
Nothing fancy here, just a zip!
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Joshua Tagicakibau
I took this photo on my trip to the Tesselaar Tulip Festival during the Irish weekend. It was the first time that I had been here and whilst I was here mainly to take photos of the tulips, there were lots of these bees near the bottom of the tulip farm. Decided to spend a fair amount of time down there trying to capture these bees with my macro lens, and I must say, they are probably one of the most difficult subjects to take photos of. Extremely quick and constantly moving make them very challenging to take photos of. This photo is one of the better ones that I captured on that day.
Camera: Nikon D90
Lens: Tamron 90mm macro
ISO: 1000
Shutter: 1/2000s
Aperture: f/8
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Erica Haines
On close inspection, my eye was drawn to the centre of the array of beautiful Orchids, in my Mum’s Garden. It looks like a little bird trying to grow it’s wings and take flight away from it’s shelter.
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Chrisdian W
Camera: KODAK EasyShare Z990
F-stop: f/4
Exposure: 1/60
ISO: 125
Post processing: cropping onlyWent down to Sydney for the long weekend and spent few hours in the Wild Life Sydney Zoo and met this cute and beautiful little creature! It’s just so heart-warming to see them even though they just hang on that tree and sleeping!
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Chris Hardinge
Hi there,
I was coming home from work after having picked up a new Lumia 1020 the night before. I’d been itching all day to play with the camera – and ended up giving in and pulling over to the side of the road and taking a few pictures and experimenting with different ISO + shutter speed etc.
There was many more that I took of the landscape, but this is one of two macro shots.
The sun was setting and I set an ISO of 100 with manual focus and lined it up so that what was left of the sun could overexpose the branches that were out of focus.
Although I do have a 1020, I’d love to give one to my girlfriend for Christmas one way or another.
I hope you enjoy! Thanks
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Jarrad Evans
Panasonic Lumix FZ35, macro 5mm focal length. Cropped in Picasa
I took this photo at Queens Park in Toowoomba. The day was extremely sunny and hot. I caught this little native bee foraging on a flower and grabbed this pic before it took off.
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Martin C
Taking shots of the kids in the pool with my underwater camera and decided to try and capture some macros of the many hornets that have decided to stop by for a drink. I liked the water droplet on the back of this ones head the best.
Olympus TG-820 s macro mode, ISO 100, WB underwater, 1/160sec @ f/4.7 cropped and processed in LR 5.2.
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