Posts Tagged macro
Keeping an eye on liberty
Posted by Doug Otto in Geek, Photography on January 25, 2010
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As I mentioned last week, I find macro photography to be very therapeutic. While I frequently drift from my landscape photography focus, macro photography is very similar; the compositions are just on a smaller scale.
About this time last year, I finished working on a custom macro lens. While sitting at home on a rainy weekend it occurred to me that I hadn’t tried it out on my new Canon 7D. The sensor format of the 7D gives it even more magnification than I get on my 5D. This image is a photograph of a small portion of a US dime. The area depicted is less than 5/16″ across. My, just turned 45 eyes, can’t even focus on it without my readers.
Cheers
Tiny Landscapes
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on January 19, 2010
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There’s something very therapeutic about macro photography. When you shrink your view of the world to that of a tiny object it’s almost reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. It’s very easy to get lost in the land of giants created by the lens.
A few years a go we had to remove a beautiful Ash tree in our yard. We were sad to see it go but it was beginning to damage our home’s foundation so we had little choice. The tree company ground up all of the surface roots but left a ton of organic material in the ground. Every time it rains we get some new fungus growing up through the lawn. The dog vomit slime mold is especially nice.
This little patch of mushrooms appeared about a week ago. To make this image, I used my ground tripod, Canon 7D and my 100 macro lens. I’m pretty sure my neighbors thought I was nuts, crawling around the yard.
Cheers
Flower Macro
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on April 30, 2009
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I really enjoy macro photography but rarely practice it “in the field.” Often when I’m out doing a shoot I don’t even bring the macro lens along. Really it just comes down to what I’m able to comfortably carry. The 100 macro is just “one lens to many” to fit into my routine. The result is that most of my macro shooting is done at home, in a studio type setting.
This image was no different. I went out into the yard looking for subjects. I found this flower as well as a few other items and set up my “studio.” The studio consists of a Wimberley Plamp, a small compact fluorescent light (CFL) and a back drop; in this case a dish towel. I find that with macro work you need to work the scene just as you would when shooting a landscape. I rarely find a pleasing composition on my first exposure. It takes moving the camera, the object and the focal plane to extract that one shot that grabs your eye. Read the rest of this entry »
The color that we don’t see
Posted by Doug Otto in Geek, Photography on April 2, 2009
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I was going through some old images and I stumbled on this one. A friend had asked to use a couple color infrared images as examples for a presentation. I had to do a little digging to find some but of the ones that I dug out, this is my favorite.
A couple of years ago I converted my Canon RebelXT for infrared (IR) use. All digital sensors are sensitive to IR. So much so, that there is actually a filter, or “hot mirror”, in front of the sensor to block IR light. The conversion process removes that filter and replaces it with an opaque filter that only passes IR light. The type of image captured by the new filter depends on it’s wave length. The filter that I used is roughly 680nm. The resulting image retains some color, albeit pretty strange. Filters in the 830nm range pass no visible light so they produce strictly B&W images.
This image is of a bright orange flower with a dark black center. Rather than capturing visible light, the camera is capturing only reflected IR. The results can be other-worldly.
I don’t use this camera much and I’m not quite sure why. I think that I might have to bring it out more often.
Cheers
Digital Picket Fence
Posted by Doug Otto in Geek, Photography on January 29, 2009
One week after building it, I finally had a chance to spend some quality time with Frankenlens. I started out playing with flowers and leaves from the yard but, as is usually the case, I “wandered off.”
Looking through a macro lens changes your perspective on normal objects. Under magnification our brains try to connect what we see with something within our normal frame of reference.
For me, that’s the fun of macro work. My frame of reference is largely landscape photography. When I start looking at objects on the macro level I start seeing themes and shapes. Moving the object a quarter of an inch can radically change the perspective of the image. It’s amazing how, once you let go of your normal analytical processes, you can spend hours looking at the same object. Each new view shows you something that was there all along but you never noticed.
This image was made of the connector on the edge of a laptop hard drive. The brass pins are 4mm tall. The image was cropped slightly to clean up the edges and adjust the rotation. The exposure was made on my Canon 5D, using my reversed 18-55 EF-S lens set at 55mm. The aperture was f/22 for 3/4 of a second at ISO 800. With this homebuilt macro lens the working distance is really small. I was no more than 2 inches from the subject and at 18mm it gets even smaller, a little over an inch.
Cheers
Getting closer
Posted by Doug Otto in Geek, Photography on January 22, 2009
While most of what I shoot is generally classified as landscape or nature photography, I’ve always been intrigued by macro work. Since photography is only a part time thing for me sometimes real life dictates that I can’t always just take off and head to Yosemite on a whim. On those occasions I sometimes spend the afternoon “playing” with a macro lens. There’s something really interesting about seeing ordinary things on an extraordinary scale. Scratches become valleys, specs of dust become boulders, peppercorns become asteroids. There are so many details, in every day objects, that we just don’t see. Ironically macro photography, in my aquarium, was really what reignited my interest in photography.
Macro photography, by definition, is magnification of 1:1 or higher. What the ratio refers to is the size of the image projected onto the film plane or image sensor. An object at 1:1 magnification is the same size as it’s projection. At 2:1 it’s the projection is twice the size of the object in real life. Getting to 1:1 magnification generally requires some special equipment. Zoom lenses, such as my Canon 24-70 f/2.8 often say “macro” on them but that only means that they have a shorter minimum focusing distance than a non-macro version. None of the zoom lenses in that category, that I’m aware of, will get to 1:1 and therefore aren’t truly macro lenses. Generally speaking to get a true macro lens you’ll need a prime, (non zooming), lens. My favorite is the Canon 100mm f/2.8.
There are other ways to get to 1:1 magnification, which is really the point of this article….
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