Showing posts with label macro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label macro. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Hodegs Garden - Orange Moth
I must have chased this poor little guy for 15 minutes from flower to flower. Finally the wind settled down and i was able to creep up and capture this close-up image using a 200mm lens.
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.
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.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Using Natural and Artificial Light
With all the flowering plants sprouting up outside I decided to do some close-up macro photography using the flowers as my subject. I went outside setup my tripod, attached the camera and mounted my Tamron 17-70mm MACRO lens to the camera.
I then set the aperture to f/25, manually focused on the flower and looked through the view finder to see the flower wiggling back and fourth as it was buffeted by the winds. I popped off a few shots and quickly determined that this wasn't going to work because I couldn't keep the ISO at 100 and get the shutter speed high enough to compensate for the movement caused by the wind. So what to do next? I went in the house to get a pair of scissors and vase. I was going to cut the flower and bring it inside and photograph it there. But what do I see sitting on the kitchen table? A new flowering plant that my wife had just purchased and the flowers where orange, my favorite color. I had a new subject to photograph.
I typically shoot using natural light but I was in an experimental mood so I retrieved my tripod and camera from outside and set it up in the kitchen. I placed the flower pot near a window to provide some back lighting using the soft natural sunlight flowing in from the northern facing windows. Because I was using the natural light as a back light I had to use artificial light to illuminate the front of the flowers to prevent a silhouette effect. I could have used the camera's built-in flash but that would have most likely washed out the color and flattened the image. I set up my portable light stand and umbrella and mounted my Canon 480 EX flash in slave mode and placed it at a 45 degree angle just to the left and above the flowers and bounced the light using the umbrella. I mounted my Canon 580 EX II flash on the camera's hot shoe and pointed it straight up to bound the light off the ceiling and provide fill light. I overexposed by about 1-1/3 stop to blow out the background.
I like the results, what about you?
f/22, ISO100, 4.0 sec, 70mm
This is the same image as above post processing in Lightroom 2.0 to convert it to black and white and overexposed to give it a high key look.
I then set the aperture to f/25, manually focused on the flower and looked through the view finder to see the flower wiggling back and fourth as it was buffeted by the winds. I popped off a few shots and quickly determined that this wasn't going to work because I couldn't keep the ISO at 100 and get the shutter speed high enough to compensate for the movement caused by the wind. So what to do next? I went in the house to get a pair of scissors and vase. I was going to cut the flower and bring it inside and photograph it there. But what do I see sitting on the kitchen table? A new flowering plant that my wife had just purchased and the flowers where orange, my favorite color. I had a new subject to photograph.
I typically shoot using natural light but I was in an experimental mood so I retrieved my tripod and camera from outside and set it up in the kitchen. I placed the flower pot near a window to provide some back lighting using the soft natural sunlight flowing in from the northern facing windows. Because I was using the natural light as a back light I had to use artificial light to illuminate the front of the flowers to prevent a silhouette effect. I could have used the camera's built-in flash but that would have most likely washed out the color and flattened the image. I set up my portable light stand and umbrella and mounted my Canon 480 EX flash in slave mode and placed it at a 45 degree angle just to the left and above the flowers and bounced the light using the umbrella. I mounted my Canon 580 EX II flash on the camera's hot shoe and pointed it straight up to bound the light off the ceiling and provide fill light. I overexposed by about 1-1/3 stop to blow out the background.
I like the results, what about you?
f/22, ISO100, 4.0 sec, 70mm
This is the same image as above post processing in Lightroom 2.0 to convert it to black and white and overexposed to give it a high key look.
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