Friday, August 24, 2007

Getting Into the Flow

Water 1

OK, I know I'm slower than a faucet drip getting these posts in, but I'm going to double my efforts to get that faucet flowing, even if I have no readers at this point.



This above shot was taken with my new poor man's macro setup. I took an old manual 50mm lens from my first SLR setup, which was a Konica TC-X manual everything camera given to me by my Dad and reverse mounted it to another lens. I haven't taken pictures with this in 5 or 6 years, but it's still special to me as my late father gave it to me, so it was great to put that 50mm F/1.8 lens to use from it. To mount the lenses face to face I took two cokin mounting rings, which are threaded on one side and have a flat ring on the other side, and superglued them together. Sorry, I didn't take any pictures of the mounting ring or of the lenses mounted together, but here's a few sample shots I took with it. Hope to take some more soon.

Match Stick

Water Drop on Flower

Rust

You really need to stop down your aperture to get any kind of usable DOF. These are taken at F/22 and have a DOF of about a millimeter or so. To get enough light for this I took my 430ex flash and connected it to my camera via the Canon off camer shoe cord 2. This is one of the few times you'll ever see me using E-TTL for off camera flash. I usually use old Nikon flashes in full manual, but for this application I found the E-TTL just plain easier. Anyhow, the beauty of photographing some so small is that your bare flash becomes a large light source. Putting it just outside the frame is equivalent to taking a normal portrait with a large softbox. Remember, it's not the fixed size of your light source that matters, it's the size relative to what you're lighting. In converse if you try to light a large object like a car, you better have a huge light source if you want it to be soft(ie, not harsh shadow lines like a hard light provides). More of these topics in later posts.

Not bad to get a 2:1 magnification using things I already had plus an 8 dollar trip to the local camera store. Now I just need to figure out how to keep the bugs still while I get in within an inch or two of them to get them in focus.

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