TimGarlick
Macro gear #2 - Studio setup
I had purchased an external flash (Canon 430EX II) and thanks to a very kind donation from Sumowesley I was able to get it off camera with the Canon ST-E2 infrared transmitter. An alternative to this would be to use a flash trigger cord, but I would try to get one with E-TTL capabilities if possible. It's not a necessity but you will be stuck with using manual mode without it, and ETTL capabilities have proved useful for macro photography out in the field.
The other change from my previous setup was I purchased a cheap set (about £8) of extension tubes. These are a set of varying length hollow, metal tubes (3 in total, not including the end adapter) that screw together to give a maximum length, or you can leave one or more out to give different levels of magnification.
Their main purpose is to move the lens away from the sensor plane to decrease the minimum focus distance to a subject. The result of this is that you can physically move your lens closer to a subject and as a result it will appear larger on your camera sensor (try it with you current camera and lens - focus on a small object then move in closer; at some point you will no longer be able to focus on the object despite it being some distance away - if you have a macro lens, or a lens with macro capabilities, you shouldn't have this issue).
An even cheaper alternative is to make you own set of extension tubes. Some people have used an empty pringles tube for this, and copious amounts of tape. As big a fan as I am of DIY mods to my camera gear, I figured it was worth the small investment for some purpose made tubes. For a much higher price (almost 10 times as much) you can get tubes that allow you to control the aperture setting of your lens through the camera. The cheap versions don't have this functionality so you have to rely on the DoF button trick as describe in my first gear post.
Usually I would hand hold camera and lens in one hand (its pretty light) and hold the flash in the other, however I also started experimenting with focus stacking.
Focus stacking is where you take a number of images of a subject with the focal point at different points (this is necessary because you get a very narrow Depth of Field at higher magnifications) before merging them together in specialist software (CombineZP is probably the best freeware example). I started by placing the camera on a suitably sized book, lining it up with the subject, then pushing the book slightly forward to move the focus point between each shot. I could get some OK results like this, but I was getting small sideways movement and this led on to my next purchase, a macro rail (another £8).
The macro rail enables me to mount the camera on a tripod and edge the camera forward on a slider in small increments reducing the chances of misalignment due to unwanted sideways movements.
I also used an external flash to light the subject (usually a dead insect of some kind) and began experimenting with home made diffusers, the latest example of which can be seen above (more about that in the next post). I had the Joby Gorillapod Zoom (my first tripod purchase) which I found to be really useful for mounting the flash (I didn't realise at first that the little plastic "foot" provided with the flash has a screw adapter so I could attach it to the ball head mount).
This is the setup I used a lot, mounted on the tripod for studio stacks, and handheld out in the field.
See the next post for the most recent (and by far biggest) investment in my macro photography and see the previous post for how I got started.
Examples of images I have taken with this setup can be seen in the first comment below.
Macro gear #2 - Studio setup
I had purchased an external flash (Canon 430EX II) and thanks to a very kind donation from Sumowesley I was able to get it off camera with the Canon ST-E2 infrared transmitter. An alternative to this would be to use a flash trigger cord, but I would try to get one with E-TTL capabilities if possible. It's not a necessity but you will be stuck with using manual mode without it, and ETTL capabilities have proved useful for macro photography out in the field.
The other change from my previous setup was I purchased a cheap set (about £8) of extension tubes. These are a set of varying length hollow, metal tubes (3 in total, not including the end adapter) that screw together to give a maximum length, or you can leave one or more out to give different levels of magnification.
Their main purpose is to move the lens away from the sensor plane to decrease the minimum focus distance to a subject. The result of this is that you can physically move your lens closer to a subject and as a result it will appear larger on your camera sensor (try it with you current camera and lens - focus on a small object then move in closer; at some point you will no longer be able to focus on the object despite it being some distance away - if you have a macro lens, or a lens with macro capabilities, you shouldn't have this issue).
An even cheaper alternative is to make you own set of extension tubes. Some people have used an empty pringles tube for this, and copious amounts of tape. As big a fan as I am of DIY mods to my camera gear, I figured it was worth the small investment for some purpose made tubes. For a much higher price (almost 10 times as much) you can get tubes that allow you to control the aperture setting of your lens through the camera. The cheap versions don't have this functionality so you have to rely on the DoF button trick as describe in my first gear post.
Usually I would hand hold camera and lens in one hand (its pretty light) and hold the flash in the other, however I also started experimenting with focus stacking.
Focus stacking is where you take a number of images of a subject with the focal point at different points (this is necessary because you get a very narrow Depth of Field at higher magnifications) before merging them together in specialist software (CombineZP is probably the best freeware example). I started by placing the camera on a suitably sized book, lining it up with the subject, then pushing the book slightly forward to move the focus point between each shot. I could get some OK results like this, but I was getting small sideways movement and this led on to my next purchase, a macro rail (another £8).
The macro rail enables me to mount the camera on a tripod and edge the camera forward on a slider in small increments reducing the chances of misalignment due to unwanted sideways movements.
I also used an external flash to light the subject (usually a dead insect of some kind) and began experimenting with home made diffusers, the latest example of which can be seen above (more about that in the next post). I had the Joby Gorillapod Zoom (my first tripod purchase) which I found to be really useful for mounting the flash (I didn't realise at first that the little plastic "foot" provided with the flash has a screw adapter so I could attach it to the ball head mount).
This is the setup I used a lot, mounted on the tripod for studio stacks, and handheld out in the field.
See the next post for the most recent (and by far biggest) investment in my macro photography and see the previous post for how I got started.
Examples of images I have taken with this setup can be seen in the first comment below.