Atlantic Calico Scallop

Atlantic Calico Scallop Revisited

I photographed and posted an Atlantic calico scallop several days ago. I was not entirely satisfied with it, so I have come back to it today. Today I wanted to improve the quality, mainly the sharpness, and take another run at color and composition. It is less soft this time; the detail of the texture is better. I like how the layers of the shell appear like stacks of coins forming the ridges. I also like the color better, sticking to the white and red, leaving out the rather unappealing yellow area that appeared in the last photograph. I flipped it, as well, for the look of radiating downward, in the reverse of a more common presentation of a sea shell of the scallop type.

As before, this is backlit with an LED flashlight. In order to increase the depth of field and thereby the overall sharpness, I set the Nikon D90 on aperture mode at f/22; in order to get a handheld exposure of 1/80 second I used a 3200 ISO. This introduces more grain, but the grain does not seem to be a particular problem here. The shell has a granular surface anyway. The lens was the best cheap macro, the Micro-Nikkor 60mm AF f/2.8.

Red scallop

Red scallop as posted earlier