Attractive Cube In A (Spherical) World

Posted by Xef on Mar 17, 2011 | 2 comments

As you would, undoubtedly, expect from me, this is the second photo of the occasional outburst of inspiration and determination that I get whenever I do something new with my blog. I hope this inspiration and determination will last longer than my normal ones. Regardless, I will take this wave and ride it out till it lasts.

This is a toy, I think, made of small spherical magnetic balls (Jack McFarland: “Hihihi… balls”). There are 216 of these here balls spheres about 1 cm in diameter, connected together via their intense need to cling to (on?) something. I saw these spheres way before I saw Big Bang Theory, so I thought these had just one polarity (i.e. monopoles) (ah… the ignorance). It was only after multiple failed attempts to construct them into various shapes that it occurred to me that they actually had two if not a gazillion (believe me, it will try your patience). As you can see in the photo, these spheres have been through a lot of handling (see why I avoided using “balls”) as they are very much scratched and stained. The thought of taking its picture came to me after the first week that I saw it but due to laziness and other circumstances (read: more laziness), it was only after a year that I managed to take some photos of it.

This was supposed to be a macro shot but I didn’t (and still don’t) have the right equipment for it and, since this was the third of three subjects in my schedule for that day, my patience was already spent. I settled for a close up shot instead. The setup was like this: I placed a black seamless paper on a table where part of it was on the table and the other taped to the wall;  the cube of spheres was near the edge of the table; the sphere was made to “stand” with the help of a paper clip, there was one flash positioned directly above the cube pointing directly downward with a soft box attached to it; the camera was on a tripod about ten to twelve inches away from the cube; the lens was the 85mm attached to the shortest and middle ring of a macro extension tube.

This is the result of that setup. I did not notice that the clip was showing at the bottom (and for those of you who didn’t notice it, pretend you didn’t read that) but it isn’t that distracting. Also, I think there was too much ambient light for my taste. I wanted the lower tier of spheres to not be so bright. However, in spite of the spheres being scratched, they retained much of their reflectiveness. I just lowered the exposure to a level that wasn’t detrimental to the detail of each sphere.  All in all, I like the photo (of course, since I chose to display it in public).