The making of a "YO DAWG" image

"YO DAWG" is an internet meme. You can search for the term "YO DAWG" to see many examples. They mostly have this in common: A picture of something inside something similar, lets call this object a, accompanied by the text

"YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE TO verb(a) SO WE PUT A a IN YO a SO YOU CAN verb(a) WHILE YOU verb(a)"

Another cliché in terms of photography, is to take a picture of something while holding a lens between the subject and the camera, so that the subject is seen through a lens. The obvious thing to do, is of course to combine these two by letting a be a lens.

First, let's take the image. In the setup below, I used a Panasonic Lumix GH1 camera, with the Lumix Leica 45mm macro lens attached. I used a TTL flash angeled upwards to bounce the light off the white ceiling. I used f/8 to get a reasonable depth of field.


In the front of the camera, I am holding a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AIS pancake lens. Virtually any fast normal lens could have been used here. In the background is a Nikkor 24mm f/2 AIS lens.

Due to the CDAF system, I can use autofocus on the camera to make sure the lens on the table is in focus, even when looking at the lens through the 50mm pancake lens. This would have been difficult with PDAF systems on DSLR cameras.

The resulting image looks like this. The lens held could have been more in focus. Had I used an even smaller aperture than f/8, the depth of field would have been better. But I think it is sufficiently in focus.


Looking at a closer crop of the centre of the image, we can see that the lens on the table is in perfect focus, thanks to the CDAF system:

Now, we only need to add the text to complete the "YO DAWG" image: