Native American Fetish Carving

This was done using a segmented mirror beam splitter box and a Sigma DP3 Merrill, with a front 3 diopter 72 mm diameter achromat for extra magnification. This little carving is only 1-1/4″ tall. I bought it from a Native American artist in Albuquerque from the State Fair 2006. I am looking for his name, but can’t find the receipt. If I find it I will update the post. This was done with a ring flash held off-camera (up and to the left). with a black velvet background. You can see the plastic base the carving was resting on. The lower left photo is the mirrorbox with the top off. The two first surface mirrors direct  the left and right halves of the camera frame along axes that give a 12 mm stereobase. Stereophotomaker corrects the slight keystone distortion nicely. Its made from 1/4″ ABS sheet solvent welded. The lower left face of the cube has a filter mount for screwing on AR filter and accessory lenses, the right face has a filter mount with adapter which accepts the Merrill DP3. Knobs allow the filter ring to be loosened to align the camera with horizontal plane of the macrobox. The macro mirrorbox is essentially treated as a “lens”. It hangs off the Merrill, which has a nice strong snoot. The right image shows the rig in use. The camera is mounted to the Benro Angel tripod with ARCA plate…from this vantage point, the mirrorbox is hidden by the flash power supply at the top. The accessoy lens and ring flash are on the left facing face of the cube. The subject here is a sprig of pinon stuck in an old 120 takeup spool. I’ll convert that image to film. Have some nice macro shots with this rig, just getting used to it.

ALSO: I will look at moving back or using focus stacking to increase DOF so the entire subject is sharp.