I am on the hunt for finding beauty in everyday objects. Things which we take for granted.  This project came to mind, after  I was thinking about how light would be refracted within a tiny sugar crystal.

Actually, I was on the hunt for actual crystals and had been thinking of buying one. But I could not find anything which suited my likings. So now I had two options

1. Buy a costly crystal stone
2. Ice cubes

But then it struck me. Those tiny granules of sugar, we call them, sugar crystals. If they indeed are crystals, it you should be able to reflect and refract light in the way I had imagined. Once this came to mind, I decided to go ahead with the setup

Photo setup – Choosing the lens

1. This had to be a macro photo and would require reverse mounting the lens, in order to get such close up photos
2. The regular pick would be to go with the 50mm prime lens, but as per the suggestion from Suhas, I decided to give a try with my kit lens
3. Voila ! No image ! It was all pitch black in the view finder even when I pointed the camera at the light bulb. I was shocked, I thought I had accidentally damaged some internal part of the camera, by reverse mounting a kit lens, which was a strict no no in the photography world.
4. Now I turned the focus ring on the lens from 18m, all the way up to 55mm and guess what, I could see some feeble light in the view finder
5. I thought to myself, this is gong to be one cool challenge if I could shoot the sugar crystals using the kit lens and not use a prime lens and I stuck with that

Photo setup – lighting and apparatus

1. Sugar was spread on a white paper to avoid any distraction from the background. I was not worried about the actual background since the big aperture ensured that most stuff in and around was out of focus
2. I used a table lamp fitted with 23W CFL bulb which illuminate the sugar crystals. The lamp was kept as close to the sugar crystals as possible
3. There were two problems that I faced
   1. Most of the picture was out of focus
   2. The sugar crystal just looked plain white ( as it was supposed to look ) without the shining and sparkling I was expecting
4. The first problem was solved in post processing where I made the corners of the image dark, thereby making the audience concentrate at the center of the image NOTE : Always make sure you keep the center portion in focus and leave out a little space in the edge ( check out point 5 in the page ‘ Thoughts on photography – Tips for beginners‘ for more details
5. For several shots, the crystals just looked normal until I started shifting the light source ( table lamp ) around the crystals until I started getting images where the light actually sparkled. Moving the light around was very important to ensure that light reflected and refracted at different angles with the respect to the camera, resulting in the sparkling effect
6. I was able to bring more effect by separating the granules and not keeping them close together, thereby not letting the granules cast shadow on each other

Details about the image

Post processing

1. All post processing was done using Adobe Light room
2. Added dark corners to the image
3. Increase contrast ( the correct amount of brightness and contrast ensured that the sugar granules had a shine in them )

 Original Image

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