Sunday, May 03, 2009

It's a Macro Morning

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last BLOG entry. I've been busy with work and family matters and just haven't had any time to go out and shoot.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for a business trip to San Diego, California where I hope to have time to get out of the hotel and conference hall and shoot some photos. Hopefully I'll be able to write a BLOG entry or two while in San Diego. This will be my first visit to the San Diego area.

Ok, now on to the reason I started writing this BLOG entry. This morning while my wife Dawn and I where checking on our vegetable garden in the backyard (we should be harvesting green beans and red bell peppers shortly) we noticed that one of her many lillies was blooming so I decided to use it to practice some macro photography using a new set of extension tubes I recently purchased. Extension tubes are spacers that fit between the lens and the camera and push the lens further away from the film or photo sensor which results in a magnified image just like using a magnifying glass to read small text. There is a downside to using extension tubes and that is it reduces the amount of light that falls on your film or photo sensor and it also reduces the sharpness of the overall image.

Each the following three images in this series is a progressively closer macro image of the lilly taken with a Canon 40D and Sigma 17-70mm Macro lens. Because of a slight breeze the second two images had to be taken at ISO400 so I could get the shutter speed fast enough to stop any motion blur caused by the wind moving the flower.

ISO100, f/11, 1/100 sec at 40mm without Extension Tube.
ISO400, f/36, 1/50 sec at at 70mm with 21mm Extension Tube.
All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.

ISO400, f/22, 1/30 sec at at 70mm with 31mm Extension Tube.