Getting Into the Flow

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.







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.