Sea Shell Macro

I had set up a small macro studio in my office and wanted to try out different lighting and camera settings. The only problem was I needed something to photograph.

Thankfully, a recent visit to my parents house solved the issue. My mother has a large amount of seashells she has collected over many years of trips to various beaches, and these seemed like perfect subjects for my studio’s trial run. I grabbed a handful and headed home. Here are the results:

I tried to make sure that my edits brought out the colors I was seeing in real life. The colors in my Fujifilm cameras can sometimes be a bit muted in comparison. Here are the black and white edits:

Personally, I think I prefer the black and white images.

What did I learn from this trial run? First, that I need to keep experimenting with my lighting set up. In a couple of the images, the light was far too low and the resulting high ISO compensation rendered the image too noisy for my taste. Second, I need to be more meticulous about cleaning the shells before I photograph them. In a few of the images there is dust on the shells.