BAMBYTALICA BLOG - Photography, 3D Modeling, Design

Macro Photography

2022-09-20T19:59:00.009+02:00

Photography capturing

Macro Photography

Small, But Complex Subjects

What is Macro Photography?

Rough definition of macro photography is that the subject is photographed at 1:1 magnification, in other words, the subject is life-sized compared to the camera sensor.

How I started

I have had a high interest in shooting macro photos since my beginning photography interest. A long time ago, I captured the first macros with my first digital compact camera which was some 5.0 MPX Minolta model. When I bought my first DSLR Nikon D5200 which I still use, I found it is much harder to properly capture any macro image. At first, I didn’t understand much what lens specifications serve for, especially lens’s focal length. I bought my camera with kit lens 18-55mm and 35mm prime lens. I figured out that those lenses are not very good for macro photography. Then I started searching to buy some dedicated macro lens, but I found that it was too expensive for me. I am still a beginner and do not want to invest a lot of money, still photography is just a hobby. But that’s no mean that I should completely abandon macro shooting. Hopefully there is a much cheaper solution to transfer your lenses to macro lens.

My rig

First I decided to buy macro extension tubes, which are basically rings that you put between your camera and lens. It cost around 20€. What it does, it puts your lens further away from the camera sensor and magnifies the photography subject to the sensor. You can find plenty of descriptions and information on the internet about how it works. Usually they come in different sizes. I bought three tubes which are active, which means it has all connectors and wires so the camera still communicates with your lens. That means you can still use camera autofocus and automatic shutter speed etc. Does it help? Well, not a lot. I played around with these macro tubes which was really fun, but I didn't capture any significantly good photos with them.

One of the biggest issues with macro shooting overall is very tiny and shallow small depth of field. That means you will be facing with a very small part of the image that is in perfect focus, usually just around 1mm. Second thing is poor light. You will need to add some kind of secondary light source to your subject.

Shallow Depth of Field

So I started to look into some different kinds of solutions and I found that a reverse lens kit is maybe one of the solutions. These ring adapters are going again to your camera but the other side of the adapter has threaded end like lens filter has. Basically it allows you to connect your lens opposite to your camera. This was very odd to me, but surprisingly it works very well and it costs just a few €.

Of course when you connect lenses like that, you will lose all of the camera's intelligence and the camera will not recognize the lens at all. Who cares, macro photography should be totally manual anyway. I found that longer lenses will work better with reverse rings. I tried with my wide angle 10-20mm, it creates a very great magnification but depth of field is almost useless. With my 35mm prime, it was fine, but with the kit lens works the best at 55m, the longest focal length. After a lot of shooting, I saw I was getting better images than with macro tubes, but still I didn’t solve the light problem. I still get very dark images with poor quality. There are plenty of macro lights and flashes on the market, but I decided to create some kind of deflector and use camera kit flash. It was a piece of paper cardboard rounded and taped with a steel wire which I mounted somehow on my camera. It looked very funny and everyone laughed at me when they saw me hunting bugs with that. Now is broken since it was from a paper, I need to create new one, you have a lot of examples how to do it, just search online macro flash deflector.

My tactics

The thing is when you have your lens counter mounted on the camera, you need to regulate the lens's aperture - the opening of a lens. I use one finger to move this small handle on a lens and regulate the amount of light which is entering inside your sensor. More the light - focal length will be smaller and opposite, less light or smaller aperture - focal length will be larger. But you need to find a fine spot between both of that. Usually you wouldn't know if a photo is good till you saw the captured image on your camera display. That’s why I always capture a few images with different apertures each time in very short of time because, you don’t want to lose your active subject and in mine case this is usually bugs. Even though I got a little better depth of field, if I want to get more of the subject in focus, then I need to stack a couple of images. Those few below are stacked of 3 to 5 images with different focus points.

I enjoy shooting spiders a lot because they are more passive than other bugs like flies, butterflies, ants etc.

I am looking forward to buying a dedicated macro lens. For now, the Tokina 100mm f/2.8 is my favorite choice, but we will see in the future. Why Tokina, because you can get the sharp, quality, made in Japan lens for a much less money the you will pay for Nikon, Canon, Sigma or Tamron macro lenses.

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Misty Mornings

2022-09-16T19:30:00.009+02:00

Today I would like to speak about the foggy and misty weather. It is normal that you will catch such weather in early morning or after rain during colder days in autumn, winter and spring. For this kind of condition you will probably need to get up a little bit earlier in the morning than usual.

Fog is very interesting in landscape photography because it can give you a mystic and not regular point of view of some potentially boring location. And it will give you a lot of fun in editing photos because you will be able to create different moods in your photos.

This image above I captured one morning when I was walking with mum’s dog. It was late autumn and just one hour after sunrise. I took my camera, which is a starter DSLR Nikon D5200 BTW, just in case I found something interesting to shoot. I passed just a few hundred meters from my mother's house and I started to see a lot of interesting sights so I started to shoot.

The main advantage of foggy weather is that objects on the image are getting a depth separation feeling. You clearly see the distance between the objects which is sometimes very hard to achieve with normal weather conditions and on the other hand, it is desirable to see that third dimension in 2D representation.

A couple of hundred meters further away, I captured this image below.

Rising morning Sun in the background of this dying tree looked interesting to me. Here I edited it a little bit harder to achieve a more moody and mystic look.

Editing is another story. With foggy images you can produce different moods, but for me, I always prefer a mystical mood when we are talking about the fog, especially when I am directly in the fog area. If you are shooting fog from a mountain top, from a distance, then it should be a more nice, typical landscape mood.

Sometimes the image and composition will look boring. Then it is time to change everything in editing.

This image below, captured one winter morning on hills. During the winter all plants are dead and flat, nothing nice to see, especially if there is no snow. This location didn't look too interesting for me, but one idea came to me, to convert photos into a night shoot. Since it is captured with a lot of light, I figured out it will be a lot of image data and details, I just need to low exposure and adjust the color temperature. Also I put several layers of area editing and I even found that the panorama ratio will be much more effective. Final image ends completely differently than I ever thought.

I apply a similar editing technique to that image also:

I got a comment on Instagram that the images looks like a scene from a horror movie. It is not the point that I like creepy and horror scenes but, it means that editing for me was successful, because I got something different and rare.

I will write a separate post with a tutorial on how this technique works.

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Landscape Photography - Right Place & Time

2022-09-09T15:59:00.034+02:00

Landscape photography is one of my hobbies. I am thinking of starting a blog with my photos and a couple of tips and tricks for creating great images.

Like this image above, captured in the right place and right time, two things that are extremely important in landscape photography. I mean, this is rule for any kind of photographing, however, you will have a little bit more time to decide about composition and rest of capturing properties than you can have it in the sport's photography.

For that particular image I spent overall more than 30 min for capturing, and 1 to 3 hours for post processing. Here is proof that sometimes you don't need spectacular places for shooting, just a regular seaside beach is good enough.

Since "right place" is not so spectacular, you will need very good timing. For this image I wait for a big, but short storm in late afternoon, just before sunset. After the storm went away, still with raindrops in my face I took the camera and tripod and started to search for a good composition with great lighting.

Just before shooting this image on top, I also capture this image below during the beautiful sunset. Again, the location is not spectacular, just a regular small public beach, some island in the distance, and a small light pole in the sea. But again, timing is crucial.

I spent 10 day of vacation at that place but there was only 1 hour of really spectacular light and atmosphere for capturing good photos.

The biggest problem is when you have little time and everything looks great around you, you will become very anxious, but in a good way, like an adrenaline rush. With that feeling you will start to shoot everything which is usually a bad thing because you will not take care about composition. In that situation you will need to slow down and find composition for shooting and spend all 30 min just for one photo. Usually, it's worth it.

I always enjoy post processing or editing of my photos. You can bring out a lot of data from your RAW image, like shadows and highlights, the most darken and lighten parts of your image. Beside that, you can adjust your color temperature, play around with lots of different sliders in your software. It is usually depends from image to image. Sometimes, when you have a batch of similar images from same location and same conditions, you can copy/paste your adjustments from image to image, or to all images that you select.

Most people use Adobe Lightroom, which is a widely popular software all around the world. I used it for a few years, but now I am moving to another software - Capture One. Capture One is a similar software to Lightroom, but it has a little bit different approach in editing and postprocessing. I found that it better suits me because of a lot of things that you can do in different layers. More about that I will put and explain in a separate post.

That's it for my first post. You have links to my Instagram profile as well to the YouTube channel on the left side of this Blog.