Photography Tips

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I thought some tips on photographing minibeasts might be useful.

I often hear a shout of  ‘Dad, Dad, go get your camera !’ from Isaac. I’m lucky enough to have a 60mm macro lens for my D200 slr, but there plenty of other ways to get some good photos of little things.

Macro Setting

If your using a compact digital, almost all of them have a ‘macro’ setting. Exactly what that does to the camera will vary between models, but it will at least tell the camera that it should be looking for a focus point that’s near to the lens. It may also ‘stop down’ the aperture to increase the Depth of Field [DoF], this is one area where small sensor compact cameras actually have a big advantage over SLR. It’s a physics thing, but basically the smaller the sensor the larger the DoF, and the easier it is to get a sharp picture that’s in focus.

Cropping

Most of us now have digital compact cameras that take photos that are 8, 10 or even 12 million pixels [aka 'MegaPixels' or 'MP ']. To put a photo on this blog that fills the column space it needs to be a little over 600px wide, if it’s a 3:2 aspect ratio that’s 600 x 400 = 240 000 pixels or ~0.25 megapixels. So if your camera is 10MP then you can crop out an image that’s 1/40th of the area of the whole photo, and still post an image that’s a good size and quality on a web page, see example below. You don’t always have to get really close, or fill the frame, to get some good usable pics to post on the web. And you don’t need to have expensive software like photoshop to do simple tasks like cropping, there are plenty of good, basic,  free photo editing and organizing tools available; picasa, irfanview, or even Paint if your on a pc and of course iphoto on a mac.

Filling the frame: Close Up Filters & Reversed Lenses

Some Digital compacts are much better than others for macro photography as they can focus very close. If your camera has a 1cm macro mode then you’re good to go, and you probably don’t need to mess about trying to get any closer. If not, and it’s a small compact camera, then there’s not much more you can do. If however you’ve got one of the larger digital compacts or ‘bridge’ cameras that have a thread for filters [sometimes you'll need to add and adapter to the camera to have this option] then you can use close up filters or even a reversed lens to get closer.

Close up filters are often available in sets with different ‘Dioptre’ s ranging from +1 to +10, the bigger the number, the closer you can focus, and the higher the magnifiction. You get what you pay for here, and the cheap £20 sets from china via ebay are pretty poor optically, here’s a comparison of some mid range Hoyaclose up filters with a proper macro lens. That said they can be fun to play with.

If you’ve got an old manual focus slr lens [50mm 'standard' lenses workreally well] then you can use this ‘reversed’ to get really close in. For use with a compact you can mount the lens ‘back to front’ in front of your camera’s. You can get ‘reversing rings‘  pretty cheap or you can just hold it infont [be very careful not to touch the lens elements together!!] I’ve used this method before, taping a 50mm nikon lens onto a canon G5, to get some good close ups. And if you’ve got an slr you can get a reverse mount adapter that lets you put a back to front lens directly onto the camera.

Lighting

If you’ve got enough light not to use the cameras flash then great!, photos taken with the cameras flash have a harsh light that rarely looks good. On the other hand trying to get a sharp photo of a little bug can be very difficult without using both a small aperture AND a high shutter speed; one of the ways to get both these is to use some flash.

If your camera has manual adjustments you can turn the flash down so that it is just providing some ‘fill’ light, try -1 ev. You can improve the look of a flash lit photo by diffusing the flash light. There are lots of DIY ways to do this such as holding a peice of thin paper or a [white] plastic bag infont of the flash. Try using a piece of paper above and behind your subject [just out of frame], this will ‘bounce’ a lot of the flash light, that would have been wasted, back towards the subject.

[Manual] Focus

One of the most frustrating things to get right in macro photography can be the focus, especially with a compact camera that just ‘hunts’ in and out trying to focus. The AF sytem is generallylooking for something with some contrast to ‘lock on’ to, so you can sometimes help it out by pointing the focus point at the edge of the subject, then re-framing once the camera has focused.

If your camera allows it, it can be much easier to work with manual focus. If you’re photographing a subject that doesn’t move and especially if the camera is fixed [ie on a tripod] then adjusting the focus manually generally works much better than using AF. If the subject is moving, and you are following it with the camera, them manual focus can also be much less frustrating than trying to rely on AF. Set the focus point to a specific distance, then move the camera keeping the subject in focus by moving the camera forward or back. This is reasonbly easy to do through a bright, accurate, viewfinder such as those on an slr, but can be more difficult using the screen on a compact. In the ‘basic macro photography’ link below the author suggests using a ‘measuring gauge’ [a stick !] attached to the camera. The end of the guage is on the ‘focus plane’ so if you have the subject in line with the end of the guage it should be in focus.

Links

I’ll add some useful ‘further reading’ links in here.

Basic macro photography

more to come soon.

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Here’s a example of how much you can crop and still get a usable photo.

This is the original photo from a 10mp camera with a crop area of 600×400 shown:

And here’s that cropped area shown full size:

The second image is approximately 1/40th the size of the original, but it’s still fine for use on the web.