Previous night I set up the computer to download some astronomy lectures and switched the room lights off. In complete darkness I noticed the interesting pattern of blue light, that was emitted by an external hard drive.

It got me thinking, how it would serve some macro shots, whether it is an interesting and fuss-free alternative to a blue gel on a flash.

As it is oten happens, the blue light is mixed with a red one—to achieve a contrasty and interesting look. In my macro setup I used a mouse (with red light on the bottom), that looks like this one below.

The mouse was held in the hand in such a way, that the red light from it lit the grid on the hard drive casing. After setting a photocamera (with a 105 mm macro lens on it) up, alligning everything, focusing—I switched the lights off and according to the plan…

…took the macro photo of the selected area.

Below you can see the final result…

…and a downsampled crop of the original.

Yet another "behind the photo" story from that night can be read here: Blue-red macro (part 2).