home-made contraption by NFarmer
Best viewed in lightbox Prototype self-writing pencil perhaps? Or, an attempt to extend this much-used pencil's life by making it longer to get a reasonable grip when using it. Or, a hack to add a missing eraser functionality to the pencil. I am not sure which. Two images, focused at two different parts of the subject, were focus-stacked in photoshop to get bit more depth of field. Shot with an old Nikon Series E 50mm lens reverse-mounted on Nikon D7200. Two inexpensive speedlight-clones were used to light this. One at 1/64 power, pointing at the subject from camera left, was triggered by on-camera flash in commander mode. The other flash, at 1/128 power, camera right and pointing at the subject, was triggered optically by the other flash. To soften the light, two tracing papers were held couple inches from the subject, one on each side, between the flash and the subject. http://flic.kr/p/Rsd1KC