Week Two

This week the assignment was close up or details:

I first thought of maybe a closeup of some fabric, the repeating pattern of the stitching would be interesting. I had darned some socks and my amateur attempt at stitching would be an amusing study. However I don’t think I’m thick skinned enough to endure the laughs and “LOL’s” that would ensue, and the discussion would veer off to darning, and not close up photography, darn (sorry)! So on to other ideas.

Walking around outside, I looked at many small things found in the back yard, but some seemed like a cliche or something, no inspiration there. As I thought about details, I suddenly thought of electronic micro-controllers. They have very small details, like micron size. The problem I faced was I didn’t think I could successfully remove the cover of a chip and still have something usable to photograph. Then I remembered that I still had some old, old, EPROM chips that had a clear crystal cover. These allow one to erase the chip by exposing it to ultraviolet light and then re-program them. Which means that one can see the entire chip down below the crystal glass window. I located one in an old dusty organizer drawer and pulled it out. Perfect!

I have an old Micro Nikkor 55mm lens which I hooked up to my Lumix GH5 and peered into the window. I had scribbled with a pencil “IBM XT” on the top of the chip. This was apparently a backup copy of a BIOS ROM chip to an old PC I had. The model number of the chip indicated that it is an 8k byte EPROM. The date code is 8550, so it was made near the end of December 1985. If you look closer, you can see the rows and columns of bytes of data, pretty cool.

I noticed that an eBay seller is selling these for $55.00! I’m sitting on a gold mine!

Anyway, week two assignment completed!