Macro Fun @ Home

 

I have been sick for a few days now, and I had to spend the weekend at home, so yesterday I decided to have some quick macro fun, I didn't expect to get great pictures, but the purpose was to have fun and to experiment with some of my less used equipment.

 

I didn't want to spend time setting up complicated lighting setups, so I went with available light, a white piece of cardboard for the background, the GorillaPod SLR Zoom with the Joby Ball Head as my tripod and finally the OMD with the 12-50 kit lens, now the kit lens has an interesting macro mode where you push a dedicated macro button on the side of the lens and move the zoom ring to a dedicated macro position, and all of a sudden, you have a 0.72x 86mm eq. macro lens with a reasonable working distance.

 

GorillPod SLR Zoom + Joby Ball Head

 

Back to the GorillaPod for a second, I bought one a while ago when I had the 5D Mark III to be able to get interesting low angles, besides, I could use it's flexible legs to mount my flashes in creative positions. I bought the baddest, heaviest SLR Zoom version (without the ball head) that could hold my 5D3, which it only can in very limited positions, not what I expected. And mounting it to the camera is done via a screw, something you can't just do by hand, you have to use a coin to screw it to your camera, and even then, the angles I could get were very limited because I was cheap and skipped on the ball head. The tripod was never used except to hold my Zoom H1 mic in unnatural positions.

 

So with the 5D3 sold and a new smaller camera took its place, I decided to invest in the ball head because it will make it more flexible, so here I decided to give it a try with this macro project, it works really well with the smaller and lighter OMD in all positions, and the ball head is very good and smooth, provided you get past attaching the quick release plate to the camera via a similar screw and a coin.

 

Now that I had my camera and background ready, what do I shoot? I went hunting around the house for tiny stuff to shoot, and here's what I found:

 

Macro Subjects

 

I didn't bother with a remote shutter release and I used the 12 second timer on the OMD, I used aperture priority mode set at ISO 200 and f/11 to get as much DOF as I can, but any smaller aperture and I started losing sharpness because of diffraction, good thing the OMD has a smaller sensor with more DOF than a full frame sensor (my 5D2 gave me a real hard time when I was shooting water drops), the other settings involved a custom white balance and turning off the image stabilization. I was using the rear screen for composition and exposure adjustment, I had a live histogram which enabled me to adjust the exposure compensation for each picture on the fly, I did it by adding positive exposure compensation until the histogram almost reached the right side since I knew the background is white and should appear so in the final image. Finally, for focusing I used manual focus and 14x magnification. Here's how the final setup looked like.

 

The Setup

 

Here is the resulting image from the setup you see above:

 

Alan Keys, this is a Serfas branded kit that I use to fix my Orbea bike

 

Just before I continue with the rest of the images and the post processing, I want to discuss another gadget, I received a couple of weird lens adapters with my OMD kit (Amazon included a zillion things for free), one promised to give a 0.45x wide angle conversion (and can double work as macro) and the other one promised 2.5x telephoto conversion, I tried both and they sucked, I was wary of adding 3rd party unbranded glass in front of my lens, the wide angle converter caused a huge loss of sharpness and caused lots of flare, the telephoto converter didn't even work, but I never tried the macro bit before. Below are some photos of the adapter itself, it uses a 58mm filter thread, and I have step-down rings with all the possible combinations, down to 37mm:

 

Wide angle adapter with the covers on

 

Covers removed

 

Macro piece un-screwed

 

It comes with a carrying case

 

As you have seen, it comes in one piece which when un-screwed, you get a small macro adapter, having tested the wide angle and telephoto adapters before, I seriously doubted the macro bit, but to my surprise it worked really well and really sharp, and I believe I was able to get slightly more than 1x magnification, below are two pictures of a pencil sharpener, the first one is taken with the 12-50 alone at maximum magnification, then the second one with the macro adapter:

 

12-50 @ maximum magnification (0.72x)

 

With the macro adapter, probably past 1x magnification

 

100% Crop

 

And this is how the camera looked like, by the way all the pictures including the OMD were taken with the Sony RX100 hand held.

 

 

I decided to go for black and white pictures (except for a couple) and a 16:9 aspect ratio for this shoot, all pictures taken at f/11, here's what I came up with:

 

Sphinx Coin

 

Medal

 

Alan Key Family

 

German Sharpener

 

Shrapnel

 

Quarter Pound

 

RX100 Aperture Priority

 

The Stiff Ring

 

Fiber Cleaning Cloth

 

Unthreaded Necklace

 

As you can see, I didn't spend any effort in lighting or using a remote shutter, I picked a few elements found around the house and enjoyed myself. I used focus stacking for the last picture, I have always wanted to try it and I had the chance, I used 5 images starting by focus on the near violet pebble to the top green one.

 

For processing I had to increase the blacks a lot, sometimes up to -100, I didn't worry about the whites since I already made sure the histogram was already near the right side, then I clicked the B&W button and used the targeted adjustment tool to adjust the shades of the different elements, and finally added a little bit of clarity and contrast, that's it.

 

I hope you've enjoyed the post, my next post will be soon, and will be about post-processing, I will pick a certain image every couple of weeks and show you the steps I use for processing this image.

Posted with Blogsy

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Toys In Distress: A Fun Weekend Project

 

I want to share with you a simple and fun project that I shot with my brother, I call this series "Toys In Distress", hit the jump for more information.

My brother (the one with the scary look here) has an artistic and a free creative mind, he always has lots of photo ideas that he wants to create, he loves photoshop and he's quite good with it. I am usually inspired by his ideas that I try taking photos outside of my comfort zone. Today's picture is a result of one of his ideas.

He wanted to take the photo you see above of a man tied by a rope on a train rail while the train is approaching, you've seen this in several cartoons including Tom & Jerry, the setup was pretty simple, a toy train, a lego man, some knitting thread and a couple of toy trees. We didn't want to complicate the setup more than that.

In order to get a low point of view I used my new Manfrotto tripod (which I will review soon), it has the ability to mount the center column in reverse, so that the camera is dangling from the tripod upside down, check this setup picture to get an idea.

 
I used my 60mm macro lens to compress the perspective and exclude lots of the clutter around the train like the brick wall at the back. I was in aperture priority mode with an aperture of f/11 to get a large depth of field, the resulting shutter speed was one second. The swivel LCD of the 60D was a bless in this situation, I was able to easily compose the image without twisting over or sleeping on the ground.

I took a few test shots, reviewed them and decided that I needed some fill light on the front end of the train, so I used the 580EX II, zoomed it to 105mm and adjusted the power manually until I got the fill I wanted, but the beam was spilling light on other areas of the train that I didn't want to light, so I used the rogue grid to restrict the beam to where I wanted. Finally I used a small piece of white cardboard to reflect some fill on the left side of the train, the black cardboard you see below the speedlite is just to keep the flash standing upright. Here's the resulting picture straight out of the camera (just added some vignette):

The picture was not as striking as I wanted, so I started playing with different lightroom presets until I stumbled on one that I liked, I think it was called "yesteryear", but it was too yellow for my taste, the main idea behind this preset is to add a yellowish color cast to the picture (split toning), all I had to do was pay a visit to the split toning tab in the develop module and reduce the saturation of the yellow color a bit, and I like the results.

We also tried a couple of different images, the first one is similar to the OP image but from a different view, and the last one was of the train derailed and the oil car burning. I hope you enjoyed the images as much as we did shooting them. I thought to share them on this blog as a sort of a break from the regular/serious technical posts. :-)

P.S. If you have been paying attention to the links throughout this post, you'll notice that I have linked to a lots of hardware reviews (the 60D, 580EX II speedlite, rogue grid, 60mm macro lens and the Manfrotto tripod). What I want to say here is that this is when all the different tools you have come into play to make the image you want, the tool in itself is not valuable as a collectible item, but how familiar you are with your tools and how/when you use them is what's important.

I once read somewhere that you have to be able to operate your camera blindly, and I am a serious believer in this now, it really pays to be able to operate your camera totally blindly and even upside down like in this example, but that's for another post.

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