The first shooting of capturing the iris of my initial subject was on January 28. The shooting was in the evening, it was completely dark, the only light source being at first try, the light of the telephone, and then an LED light held by my light assistant.
I used the light of the phone, positioned as far as possible in the corner of the eye, trying to avoid as much as possible its reflection in the iris.
The pictures were not sharp enough, therefore I changed the light source. I used a white ice LED light but as you can see the reflection on the iris and a green tint on the portrait, nevertheless I quite like the results using this type of lightning.
I shoot about 83 frames, with unsatisfactory results because I could not go close enough to get the framing that I wanted. Especially after cropping, the picture is not sharp enough, and I ended up with a small size file. Using the 600mm lens, was not giving me the results that I have visioned, so I am going to explore the possibilities of the different lens.
SECOND ATTEMPT
The second attempt was in 5.02.2021 with a super macro lens, being 1 centimetre from the subject, but this is too uncomfortable for the subject, and being such a large macro, I could capture only a part of the iris, which does not match exactly my main idea. The lens is Yasuhara Nanoha Macro Lens with a magnification of 4:1 and/or 5:1.
This is how the lens look like, and it is very interesting because it has a removable lighting module which has three LEDs for lighting very small objects, which is often necessary because the lens itself is so close as to block light from the subject.
The lens has such a large magnification, it is very difficult to handle, any minimal movement can spoil the focus, and the picture comes out of focus. This was the longest distance I could stand away from the subject, so I could take the picture and be somewhat in focus. For stabilization, the lens had to be so close, that it touch the face and that also provided support, however for the safety of the model, that was too close to the eye, which was quit concerning.
I liked the effect of the photo, but it did not exactly match my idea, so I had to try again with a third lens. Even if the outcome was not what i hoped for, it gave me new ideas, and I will develop it in the future.
THIRD ATTEMPT
The third attempt was on 10.02.2021. This time I had decided to move away from the idea of photographing the iris, but photographing a close up portrait of my subject. Trying with the third lens, an 85 mm, 1.4 lens, I made portraits of several people holding the light only from one side close to the eyes, in the dark, to avoid any other reflection on the eyes. I bought two tubes (10mm and 16mm) which i put on the device, to transform the prime lens, in Macro lens.
With this technique I reached a pretty good result, fast. The iris is much more visible, as is the depth of the eye shapes, however the file size is very small because i had to crop a lot, and i ended up with a 2 MB image.
After my three attempts, i realise that photographing the iris would not give me a strong series of images so my idea was developed, and the next thing i am going to explore and to experiment is to photographing portraits of people.