Gallery: Macro Pencils

Inspired by Gavin Hoey’s Olympus UK livestream I decided to try my hand at some macro photography of coloured pencils. You’ll see these are almost exactly what Gavin created, which means I did something right and can now get more creative with it! It’s a simple setup with a Neewer flash on a basic trigger lighting a vase with pencils hanging into it. Then just as simple as pouring some fizzy water into the vase so the bubbles stick to the pencils. To help the illusion, I added a piece of coloured card behind the vase to create the background. They were all shot on an EM1 with the Olympus 60mm Macro F2.8 lens, which captured an impressive amount of detail. I think I could probably have shot with a smaller aperture to get the larger depth of field as a lot of the photos that were binned were because the focus wasn’t quite right.