Macro Photography Journey- Part 2

Life size is a matter of perspective. We see tiny leaves and insects all the time, no big deal. To the naked eye, we see these subjects like an astronaut might see the Earth from space, or a person looking up at the sky and seeing a disc-shaped moon. With macro, I have a newfound love for nature with all its life that goes mostly unseen. Seeing creatures as they really are is a singularly rewarding experience. There’s an interaction with these little life forms, I have questions about them and they’re just as inquisitive about me. They have so much personality; macro photography lets me see them as they are. I’ve gone from stargazer to astronaut.

My final setups involved using a clamp to hold the lens and tele-converter together (donated by my Dad) and a little bit of tape to keep things in place. It took a couple of attempts to hold them together, the first time the 35mm wasn’t perfectly straight so there was distortion. But my third lens setup was truly the charm. At roughly 1.4x magnification, I have enough close-up ability to get details in tiny bugs, but not so close that I can’t get some of their environment in the photo as well.

My issue now has to do with light and depth of field. Wide open at F3.5, I have about half a millimeter in focus, no kidding. At F8 I have a decent amount in focus, with F11 and F16 being better in terms of depth of field but with slightly noticeable diffraction. These are the apertures set on the lens, but the amount of light hitting the sensor is even less because of the modified tele-converter. I’m thinking that the amount of light is still halved, so F8 is like F11, F11 is F16, etc. An external light is critical; I have no off-camera flash and am still challenging myself to not spend money.

All of the macro photos you have seen have been with the on-board flash. Playing around with different flash settings has yielded decent results, but I wanted to have the light coming from the side (and not straight on). I set out to build a diffuser, and after cutting up rolls of paper towels, Styrofoam cups, and small boxes, I’ve ended up with something decent. Using an elongated can, a cupcake plastic holder, tape, and aluminum foil, I’ve created mini Frankenstein flash unit. I haven’t had time to experiment with it much, but it does give the photos a more natural feel. A co-worker donated the last piece of the puzzle, and I hope to put this setup to use over the coming months.

I have one post left in this series, something I’m very proud of that I’d like to share. Thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to leave comments, critiques, or follow via RSS feed.

PS: If you have a chance, please stop by my new Flickr Group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ef40stm/

Tiny World 1.0+

 It has been one and a half months since my last confession.

This blog, for me, is a confession of sorts. I get to say what I’ve been doing, haven’t been doing, and what I should be doing better. Discussing different topics that mean something to me is a beautiful, double-edged source of release. On one hand, I get to get things off my chest. However, I always feel like moving on to the next experiment once I’ve posted on my blog. There’s always the next subject. This isn’t really bad, since it keeps me on my toes and trying to learn as much as I can. But at the same time, I would like to concentrate on one subject at length to truly gain an understanding, a deeper connection if you will, of myself as a person and my subject as.. well, as something more than a decent image.

Most of my time has been spent making nature photos. Part of that has to do with nature not complaining or yelling at me when making its photo. Nature sits still but is always changing, so each day holds something new. It’s fun to take scenes out of context; I like to develop characters out of inanimate scenes. With all that said, this post is the first of many regarding this subject, but I have a separate project in mind as well.

On my path to create new images and move beyond what I’ve already done, I started Macro photography a couple of months ago. In photographic terms, it’s where the subject of your photo is depicted at life size when compared to your sensor, or larger than that. An insect that is 5 millimeters long would be 5 millimeters long on your sensor; this would be 1:1 or 1x magnification. One attractive aspect to Macro photography is that you can find subjects in your own house or backyard. A few square feet of grass or shrubs can yield dozens of photographic subjects, or even on your front stoop!

My only issue when starting was that I couldn’t afford to buy a new lens dedicated to macro. I challenged myself to spend no money in the pursuit of this new genre. After a considerable amount of research, I opted to use my vintage lenses to get the magnification I needed. I started with a 35mm lens reversed onto a 135mm lens, which resulted in roughly 3.5x magnification. The results were instantly intriguing. A few millimeter-long insect/arachnid now filled the frame. This was incredible, and I knew I was on the right track. After experimenting with this setup at different focus ranges and apertures, there were two issues. First, the depth of field was ridiculously shallow. At decent apertures I had maybe 1 to 2 millimeters in focus. This made it beyond difficult to get little creatures in focus. The second issue was that the 135mm I own is a pretty beat-up lens. It has very large blemishes, scratches, and is extremely soft. At this magnification, those imperfections are also magnified.

Jumpy the Spider

As you can see from the above photo, I needed a setup that yielded better optical results. I own a 2x Soligor tele-converter that cost $12 at a flea market, but the results were awful. The single piece of glass in there was, quite honestly, piss poor. I got the idea to try and remove that glass. Internet searches were made in vain; I was on the verge of hammering out that glass. My phone has a video-recording feature, and part of the feature is to record with the flash continuously on. With this, I used the phone as a magnifier to take a closer look at the tele-converter. With this method, I saw there were two notches at opposite ends of the lens element. I used a tiny pair of needle-nose pliers, each side pressing into each dot, and rotated the lens until it was out. So now my tele-converter is an extender (I can now focus even closer to my subjects with no optical loss, only less light hitting the sensor).

My first tries were with a 50mm screwed in; this yielded the first photo in this blog post. Not 1:1, but neat nonetheless. All of this was with one goal in mind: to reverse the 35mm lens onto the modified tele-converter to hopefully reach something a little bit better than life size magnification.

On my next post I’ll be discussing what I ended up with as my lens setup, photo samples, work-arounds, and the light modifier I built.

Thanks for stopping by!

Birthday Lunch

Had an awesome birthday lunch with my co-workers. Celebrated three birthdays for our team. Great food, awesome cake, incredible company!

These Lively Times

Spring is now in full force. Never have I been so motivated to capture this steady transition; the spark of creative energy bursts forth! I've reflected over my life these last few months, improving my quality of living and treasuring the moments that are important to me. It's no easy feat, and as all my endeavors it's a work in progress. With that said, I've made remarkable headway as a result of hard work and constant motivation from my wife, family, and co-workers. You know who you are, and I thank you.

Here are a few photos I've captured. I've been pushing myself photographically, and even if it might not show I feel good about the progress that's been made.

Heartfelt

Sprouts

Smooth Transition

Imminent Sunset

Power

Thanks for stopping by!

The Kit Lens and Other Techniques- Part 7

Learning What Kind of Photography You’re Interested In

I love Asian food. I love teriyaki chicken. I love rice with soy sauce on it. I love the texture of chicken made over a pan. I love using chop sticks when eating food out of bowl; it helps me to slow down and enjoy my food. I can really taste the mix of the salty alongside the sweet and smell the aroma of the simple ingredients. With photography, you need to SLOW DOWN and SIMPLIFY. It isn’t a race or a textbook. You are creating images of subjects you enjoy. You photograph things you love. Essentially, your photography is a part of you. Your photos reflect what interested you in that moment in time. Take your time, and keep it simple. The more you show in your photograph, the more hidden your subject/intent will be.

The kit lens allows you to do this for the fact that it is a lens. It’s meant to allow you to use your camera to make photos. You need to think ahead of time about what your lens can and cannot do. When a photo opportunity arises, it should be a matter of lifting the camera and taking the photo. After using the kit lens, you’ll learn everything it does well, everything it does badly, and everything you’d like to photograph. Once you’ve narrowed down what you love to photograph, you’ll know if an additional lens is necessary or not. If the kit lens does everything you need, save your money and go on a trip! But if there are things that the lens cannot do no matter what, then you might see in investing in a lens that does what you need. By doing the Prime Lens Conversion exercise, you’ll have figured out what focal lengths you might like. If you want to do bird photography, you’ll know that you’ll need a lens with lots more zoom/reach. If you do primarily indoor, low-light photography, you might want a lens with a larger maximum aperture. In turn, if you like photographing full scenes, you could get a wide angle lens. If you prefer in-your-face portraits, then you can get a lens that is more like what your eye sees, or a lot closer, to isolate your subject. You know now that your feet can help in this as well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series. I tried to cover a lot of information as concisely as possible. There’s so much more, technique-wise, to try to explain. But this is a primer to get all that technical mumbo-jumbo out of the way so you can just go out and make some interesting photos. Even I deal with wanting absolute perfection in every photo and not end up with it. But it’s all about learning. It might take months or years to get to where you personally want to be. As a hobby, however, the photographic knowledge you acquire will let future generations know who you were, what you saw, and what that moment meant to you.



Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for stopping by. Everyone can enjoy photography, whether from a cell phone or a more expensive camera. Gear is rarely the deciding factor of what makes a work of art. If you can imagine it, you can create it.

The Kit Lens and Other Techniques- Part 6

Pre-focus

This is generalized as an advanced technique, but I promise you that on the wide angle end of your kit lens (setting your camera to f11) this is super easy. You can do this in full manual exposure mode, but I’d recommend Aperture priority if you’re not sure. Set Auto ISO if you like as well… this is meant to be fun!

Now, your kit lens does not have a focus distance guide. You’ll need to figure it out for yourself, but an easy way to set the focus would be to see the halfway point between focusing closely and focusing for something far away. These settings will allow for an extremely deep depth of field so almost everything between a couple of meters away to almost infinity will be in focus. So now all you need to worry about is framing, clean backgrounds, and pressing the shutter button. Easy peasy!

For those who have a camera with face detect, and plan on making photos of people, use this setting instead. You can still use this kind of focusing if you like, though!  

Tension

Short Distance Call

This is the next to the last post regarding kit lens techniques. Feel free to leave questions!

The Kit Lens and Other Techniques- Part 5

Turning Your Kit lens into a Prime Lens

Prime lenses help train your photographic eye. You physically need to move back and forth to frame your subject. You see the effects of how focal distance affects depth of field. With enough practice, you will have an idea of how much will be in the frame even before you lift the camera to your eye. You can replicate these learning tools with your kit lens simply by setting your camera to a focal length and putting a little piece of tape to keep the zoom ring from moving. My suggestion is to set the camera to where the focal length allows for a 3.5 or 4 aperture. (Background: My first SLR was a 35mm film camera, and my first lens a 35mm 3.5. I went almost a year with just this before using a different focal length). I currently have my kit lens set up like this (set to 20mm on a crop sensor, roughly 32mm field of view on a full-frame body).

Things You Will Learn

 1.       Cleaning up your backgrounds. The depth of field will be deep. This translates to having more in focus. You will need to pay attention to what is behind your subject. Is there a tree sticking out of their head? Are there cars behind them? Is there something distracting in the background? You will learn how to put both your scene and your subject together. This contextual balance is key.

2.       Tunnel Vision Correction. When you take a photo, your eyes get fixed on what you’re photographing, but the camera sees more than what you’ve zoned in on. When you zoom in, you further minimize the effects of background issues. However, having a wider field of view and deeper depth of field will mean that, consciously, you need to decide what does and does not belong in the frame. If you’re trying to capture the beauty of a slow moving creek, you would want to include different rocks, flowers, and shadows. However, you would want to exclude signs, floating trash, cars, etc.

3.       Learning the benefits and faults of different focal lengths. There’s no magic setting for a good photo. There’s no perfect camera or a do-it-all lens. Your camera can’t tell you what is beautiful and what is dull. You make these decisions. Once you spend a couple of months on this single focal length, you can zoom in or out a bit more. Rinse, and repeat. You’ll see certain things change. Going from wide angle to zoomed in all the way, you’ll notice that the depth of field is narrower. There’s less perspective distortion when getting very close to your subject. In my opinion, it’ll be more flattering to people’s faces (research the effects of wide angle lenses and focal length compression).

4.       Self-Fulfilling. The more you understand your camera and how to use it, the better you’ll feel. The more settings you set manually, the more you’ll understand the effects of light, aperture, and shutter speed. Beautiful photos can be made even with your camera is set to Full-Auto, so don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. The point I’m trying to make is that the more you understand the settings, the easier it is for you to utilize the automatic and Semi-Automatic features. YOU are the photographer, so if your camera can’t make the right decision you need to be able to get the photo you want yourself. This is your hobby/passion/obsession. Don’t let the camera, the tool used to express yourself, get between you and your art.


I'm glad you've hung in there through-out this series! Things are starting to wind down, so there'll be two more posts to round out this topic.