It looks soft because the sides of the letters are not perfectly sharp, due to salt not being perfectly lined up.
Printable View
It looks soft because the sides of the letters are not perfectly sharp, due to salt not being perfectly lined up.
Thats what I mean, it maybe near impossible to get sharp edges after lifting the blocks. You may want to try spraying it with hair spray or something similar before lifting the blocks.
BTW, I am a science geek. It is NaCl not NaCL. Luckily "L" does not appear on the periodic table, so you may get away with it :cool:
Just curious - What was your shutter speed?
100% Tripod with cable release or self timer on the redo (and shoot it at F/11 or F/16) would be my recommendation.
Love to see the result for a head to head.
First one was at 1/30s with a iso of 1600.
I re-shot it a day or so later, but it didn't look that much better so I elected not to post the re-do. It's a table top affair as you might imagine. My go-to tripod doesn't have a tilt feature. I suppose I could have reversed the column to hang beneath, but then I would have had to use live view (don't like live-view) for comp or taken the time and trouble to set up the a wireless connection between camera and iPad. That's a piece of cake with the a6000, but the D800 doesn't have built in wi-fi and I didn't want to deal with the extra hardware and cabling. With as much effort, or more, as the former solutions I managed to find my old Tiltall tripod (from the sixties) and the counterweight needed to use it.
When it was all set up I shot this on at f/18 with iso100 and a hint of strobe yielding a ½ sec exposure using a 3 second exposure delay mode.
http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/y...psqdbgkv8a.jpg