Kaleidoscope Photography

or
What You See Is NOT Always What You Get!
by Melani Weber

So you've acquired all kinds of incredible kaleidoscopes. You love the outsides of them, you love the insides of them; you're in love with the whole darn package. I'll bet you've even thought about photographing an image from the insides of your scopes. But if you've ever tried it you know how difficult it is. What you see as a beautiful work of art with your own eyes comes out as a tiny, yellowish blur on a photo.

There are ways to make it work, though. One piece of hardware that has helped me is the digital camera. At first I found the small lens annoying in that it made it difficult to attach other lenses. But then I realized that this tiny aperture would be perfect for peering into a kaleidoscope! Most digital cameras come with a "macro" or "close-up" setting, which you'll need to focus scope images clearly. I also use a blue filter (like the one described below) to correct for the yellow-ness of my lighting.

The tips below are excerpted from an article written by Dave Moser for Cozy Baker's book, "Kaleidorama" (now out-of-print). It gives some tips and tricks for making scope photography work for you. It was written with manual film cameras in mind, but much of it pertains to digital cameras as well.

• Use print film for daylight because the colors can be changed on reprints at the photofinisher.

• For lighting, use a 75-watt flood lamp with a clamp holder.

• Most camera lenses will not focus closer than three or four feet (except for those that have a macro focus). To allow for the very short focal distance of a kaleidoscope, use a close-up filter. This filter screws on teh front of your camera lens and comes as a part of a set of three filters of varying strengths, which you can combine for greater magnification.

• A color filter is necessary to correct for the lighting differences between what the flood lamp gives and the daylight film expects. The best filter is an 80A color balance filter (it should be a rich blue color.)

• When taking the pictures, tuck a piece of dark cloth around the kaleidoscope and camera lens to reduce any light leaking into the lens. Set the camera to Manual and the exposure to a small aperture: f16. Set the shutter speed to what the internal light meter says is correct for that aperture. Make notes of the camera settings. Take a picture, then another with the shutter speed increased by one and decreased by one.

• When developing the film, ask that the prints get no automatic color correction.

• When the prints are ready, look them over carefully before leaving the store. If the colors are not right, have the processor redo them. Also examine the central image for sharpness. If the center is not sharp, the lens was not focused well enough. If the center is sharp and the outer edges are fuzzy, set the camera aperture one number larger to increase the depth of field and increase the exposure time.

One more thing: I have to include a disclaimer about my own abilities as a photographer, which is that I don't have many of them. Throughout these pages you'll see some of my less attractive attempts at scope photography, which I hope do not detract from the scopes themselves. The apertures of some scopes are just too small to see through with a camera lens, and some scopes' focal lengths do not work well with my camera. So for these poor quality photos I do apologize. But don't hold it against the scopes, though. We all know how beautiful they all are!

Best of luck to all in your own scope photography endeavors!

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