I spent a long weekend in mid-May in Denver, Colorado getting more experience in macro photography, this time with
the great outdoor photographer George Lepp
and Eric and the two Scotts from Canon.
I’ve just never done much
macro, or close-up, work in the past so this was a good way to get instructions
and experience. Plus, the Canon folks
had a lot of equipment to borrow if I wanted.
Our shooting location was
the Denver Botanical Gardens in the
Cherry Creek area. Going early in the
morning just as they opened was a good strategy as I pretty much had the
location to myself and to the gardeners!
I focused on flowers,
leafy plants, and bugs. I have a Canon
5D Mark III camera, a Manfrotto
carbon fiber tripod, and a Tamron
90mm close-up lens. I also
experimented with Canon’s 12mm
and 25mm extension tubes, which go between the lens and camera body. This allowed me to get even closer to the
subject I wanted to photograph. I also
used my Canon
MR-14EX ring flash to illuminate my subjects. Even in daylight it’s good to use some light
to bring out details. Although this ring
light is considered not very powerful, I found it was plenty powerful for my
close up needs. With an adapter, the
Tamron 90mm slipped right into the light.
One technique I learned
was how to make it appear that everything in the shot was in focus. When shooting macro, I found you can only get
a very small part of the shot in focus; the rest is out of focus. I have a few examples of that shown here. Sometimes I will want a very narrow depth of
field to put emphasis directly on the object that is in focus. Other times I want total depth of field, or
everything in focus. THAT takes some
work! What I learned was to set up the
camera and the tripod on the object I wanted to shoot, then take multiple
photos with different parts of the photo in focus in each shot. I’d start at the bottom, then work my way up,
making sure the corners were also in focus.
In post-processing on the
computer, I would load the images into Adobe’s Lightroom program, select one of
the photos in the series and make sure that was cropped, exposure adjusted, and
anything else I saw that needed correcting.
Then I’d sync those settings across all the photos in that series. Then I’d export those photos to a TIFF
format. There is a reason for this… stay
tuned. THEN, to get that depth of field
I wanted, I loaded the photos into a program called ZereneStacker. This is a little piece of magic! The stacker program will only keep the part
of the image that is in focus so the result is a final image that is all in
focus, as long as I was able to get shots in that were in focus in the first
place. Remember, to use a tripod for
multiple shots! For individuals, it
costs $89 and for educators and students it costs $39.
One thing I learned from
the mistakes I made was how to better shoot fast moving bugs. Often it is luck that gets a bee, for
instance, in focus. I’m going to take
multiple rapid shots next time to increase my chances of the bug being in
focus. Another thing I learned was not
to try to take multiple photos of flowers that are wind blown. This will produce ghosting when stacked! Not a very appealing stacked photo.
This coming weekend I plan
on getting more macro practice at the Phoenix
Desert Botanical Garden. The best
way to truly learn any subject is to teach it to others, so Marni will be with
me while I teach what I’ve learned. I
will pass on my 90mm Tamron lens and be shooting with a new Canon
100mm IS macro lens. I’m also going
to try out my wide angle Canon
17-40mm with one of the Canon extension tubes.
I hope this was a fun and
educational read for you. A colleague at
Paradise Valley Community College where I teach has taken to call me “Photo
Yoda” which I kinda like!
Next adventure for
me? The Canadian Maritime
provinces. Canada from Montreal and
Quebec City to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Happy Shooting,
Here’s a
slideshow from Flickr on all of my macro shots:
