Putting Spark in your ads
Spark, and innovative company specializing in advertising on vehicles in a big way, has been listed as Site of the week #7 at seyDesign.com
The bigger picture
Are you into photography? Are you into close-ups? Well if you are and you’ve wondered how it’s done, take a trip over to Merrifield Photography to read their latest article: Larger than life; Macro for beginners.
The little world and weddings to be
The little world
Nothing has captured my attention in the photography world quite like macro photography. Close-ups offer a glimpse into another world not normally noticed day to day. Taking good close-ups can be challenging, so to assist you, should you try, I have written an article outlining the more important points to consider in macro photography, titled: Lager than life; Macro for beginners.
Weddings to be
I know I’ve said this before, but I really do intend to write a review of my new Whale Tail. I thought I would do it sooner than later when it dawned on me; I am shooting a wedding at the end of August, why not wait until I’ve put the diffuser through it’s paces there? So that’s the deal. Sometime near the beginning of September you can expect to see my review of Gary Fong’s Whale Tail.
Larger than life; Macro for beginners
While the most awe inspiring photography may come from a well composed landscape, some of the most fascinating imagery is of the world close up. Macro, or close-up photography is neither easy nor is it inexpensive. The gear required is not necessarily out of the ordinary, but there are a few “must-haves” in macro photography that make acquiring the pieces costly if you don’t already have them.
Let’s talk about what you need before we talk about how you shoot a macro image. At a bare minimum you need:
- A sturdy tripod (the longer, more steady a shot you can take, the better)
- A 3D adjustable head mount (for getting in to all those tricky angles)
- It’s preferable to have a reversible mast that allows you to mount your camera underneath your tripod (again, for getting in to all those tricky angles)
- A cable release or remote (for hands free, remote firing of your shutter to help reduce the potential of camera shake at slower shutter speeds)
- A lens with macro capabilities of at least 1/4X or more (the closer to 1X the better)
- a flash bracket or other means of getting adequate light on the subject
Back in the day, there were a great many options for getting closer to your subject; diopters, extension tubes, bellows, etc… but macro capabilities are now fairly common place on lenses today that there isn’t much point dwelling on any other technique. So let’s get started!
Your subject
What you choose to shoot close up can vary greatly, but generally it’ll be something that you want to either show, in part or in whole, a great amount of detail in. You might typically see close-ups of flowers and flower parts, insects, small animals, etc… But macro photography can be used on a more grand scale to show details like the coarse skin of an elephant, the granular texture of mortar in a brick wall, or the tiny fossils on a cliff face. No matter the subject matter, the technique is the same.
Working distance
About the biggest challenge you are going to have in close-up photography is getting some space between you and your subject. This is certainly true of some of the standard zooms available that offer you macro at the 70mm focal length. Where possible, and if it’s within your means, get your hands on a lens that gives you macro focus at a length of 200mm. This will give you the chance to get back from your subject, giving your subject better access to available light and giving you more options for camera angles. This also narrows the angle of your field of view, allowing you to trim out extraneous or distracting background elements from your composition.
If such a lens is not in your budget, consider getting a 2X or 1.4X tele-converter. This will increase your magnification allowing you to get about twice the distance from your subject. Keep in mind that any additional glass between your subject and the focal plane can adversely effect the image quality. Just keep an eye on this while you keep this fact in the back of your mind.
Focal plane
You have to decide what you want in focus and be sure to put as much of that parallel to the focal plane (the imaginary plane that the film or sensor lies on) as possible. In this picture (below) you’ll notice that the focal plane is on a diagonal from the top right hand corner to the bottom left hand corner, which is nearly perpendicular to the direction that the leaves veins run in. This not only accentuates perspective but serves as a place for your eyes to stand; a wide area of focal refuge before slipping down the visual slope.
It’s not always critical to have as much as possible in focus, just that what is in focus helps support the image. You want the image to feel natural, the way that your eye might see it on it’s own. In the shot of the grass below, the surroundings weren’t important, but it was crucial to align the camera so that both the blade of grass in it’s entirety and the drop of water were in perfect focus.
Depth of field
The line between how much or how little is in focus becomes very narrow the tighter your shot gets. So much so that many macro shots are unusable. Selective focus can be a desirable effect in portraiture but in macro photography, the range is so limited that having anything in focus at all is a boon. To combat this problem as best you can, you’ll need to use a tripod to steady your shot and to fine tune your composition (see “Focal plane” above), use narrower apertures and get as much light on the subject as possible to facilitate faster shutter speeds (and a narrower aperture).
What you see above is deceptive. That might look like an ordinary bee when in actual fact that bee is actually smaller than the ant pictured below. The flower he is perched upon is about 2/3rds the size of a dime from petal to petal. In order to get nearly his entire body and some of his surroundings in focus I had to set up my camera on a tripod at an ideal focal plane, making sure that nearly everything in the bottom 2/3rds of the frame would be in relatively good focus while allowing the top 1/3rd to fall away in the distance to help give perspective.
The lighting was such that I could afford an f-stop of 18 while maintaining a shutter speed of 1/80th of a second (the slowest I was able to shoot with the breeze and given the subjects flighty disposition). f18 allowed for maximum depth of field considering the conditions and helped to give me a little breathing room in my depth of field so that the bee could land anywhere within 2-5mm range and still be acceptably sharp.
I set my focus manually to the place where this little guy kept returning to and simply waited for him to come back when the air was calm. I shot both the bee and the ant with a 90mm f 2.8 1/2X macro, atop a 2X tele-converter giving me 180mm 1X macro, which makes this little bee about 7.5mm long!
For more on depth of field, read this article.
Aperture
In case you didn’t get it by this point, stop your aperture down as far as conditions will permit. The smaller you get your aperture the better your chances of getting your subject in focus. If you can’t shoot at f16 of higher due to wind or movement, get a flash in there to throw some light on your subject. When working close up every f-stop counts. Smaller apertures provide a greater depth of field which provides you with more breathing room on your focusing accuracy and your focal plane setup. Remember when working in macro, you have millimeters to play with, not inches, so make them count.
Composition
There is a tendency in close-up work to center everything and throw the basic rules of composition away. This is due, in large part that it is infinitely easier to our minds eye to bring something into focus when it lies in the center of the view finder. If you want to shoot successful close-ups though, you have to get your subject away from center. Also look for ways to have the surroundings support your subject with leading or trailing lines, forced perspectives and contrasts in lighting
or subject matter. This is a pretty tall order for a composition that might be taking place in less than a few inches of physical space, but at least considering some of these elements during setup will vastly improve your results.
Summary
To summarize quickly:
- Have a subject worth showing in such detail as close-up photography affords.
- Give yourself enough room to work around your subject. This might require a longer lens or a tele-converter but whatever the case make room between you and your subject.
- Be careful to set your focal plane parallel to any points of interest in your composition (those that will or should be in focus).
- Your depth of field is a fine dance between your focal plane and your aperture but warrants it’s own category. Be mindful of how much of the composition you can actually achieve reasonably sharp focus. The great the depth of field the better your chances of obtaining a sharp image. (read more on depth of field)
- A small aperture is the key to it all. The smaller you can squeeze those blades the better if you want to attain a usable depth of field. If there isn’t enough light available then make some.
- Composition is so important to interesting imagery. Don’t throw the rules out the window just because your composing in a few square inches versus feet or miles. The rules are the same no matter the scale.
I hope you found this rather long winded article useful. It’s hard, sometimes, to put into words something that I take for granted. Hopefully I was able to convey the ideas well enough to make you think a little the next time you try your hand at macro photography.
nutMac goes Skitchy
Part of the fun of using a Mac is all the killer software that is in development. Part of the fun of writing for an all-mac blog like nutMac.com is not having to worry about the PC world getting it.
This week, nutMac reviews Skitch, the super cool mac app for taking, annotating and sharing screen shots in the easiest way ever.
Skitch – Snap, Draw, Share
How many of you Mac users out there have heard of Skitch? If your a much a geek as me then you know about Skitch and chances you even have your beta copy and are sending out invites. For those of you that are… er… a little more normal, here is what Skitch is; Snap, Draw, Share! That’s it in a nutshell. A screen grabbing app with so much more.
There is no shortage of ways to dump your screen into a screen shot on a mac, from built in hot keys to native apps like the Grab.app found in the Applications > Utilities folder, to 3rd party apps like SnapZ ProX or SnapNDrag. But what all of these methods lack is a way annotating, marking up and sharing these screen shots. Never has it been so easy to snap draw and share screen shots and pictures before.
So lets put this app into working perspective which I will do from the perspective of a web designer, because… that’s what I know. I use this a lot to communicate with my customers and show them marked up designs, pointing area that I think need changing or explaining what I mean with certain terminology. It’s an indispensable tool for that purpose.
I am serious when I say that it has never been easier to share desktop ideas.
[tags]Skitch, screen capture, screen grab, screen shot, OS X[/tags]
How embarrassing!
So I announce yesterday how Dan Alban’s site is the latest to be shown off at seyDesign’s site of the week and ON THE DAY OF PUBLISHING his site gets changed to iWeb! What’s a guy got to do to look important around here?
Dan Alban gets listed
Dan Alban, author of such books as Digital Photography for 3D Imaging and Animation and Inside LightWave V9, has had his website listed on seyDesign.com as this weeks “Site of the week“.
Merrifield Photography demystifies HDR imagery
I love it when subjects just fall into your lap, like HDR imagery. It’s even better when they are a perfect fit for a project like merrifield-photography.com. HDR is yet another acronym that gets thrown around the web these days like some new flavor at Starbucks. It’s been around awhile but until the crazy influx of digital SLR users, it wasn’t nearly as common a practice.
Don’t know what I am talking about? Go and read the article then.
HDR imagery demystified
You’re probably starting to here about it all over the place, especially if you spend any time combing through the works at flickr. Every body is doing HDR photography, it seems, and it’s generally becoming the new age way of doing things. So what is it:
(from wikipedia) → In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures (i.e. a large range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.
In old school terms, it’s no different than what Ansel Adams used to do in the field and in the dark room, burning and dodging until the sky’s were black and clouds defined and landscapes sharp and perfectly exposed. Or in a little more recent terms, it’s like shooting a landscape on slide film with a polarizing lens to cut the sky down 2 stops, leaving you with well exposed sky AND landscape. What you want is to be able to see the detail in the sky and the detail in the shadows, but to expose that without tricker is nearly impossible.
That’s where HDR comes in. Via computer wizardry, you can take a set of bracketed exposures and marry them together to attain this miracle of perfectly exposed everything. Here is an example of a typical sunset, silhouetted horizon with a brilliantly painted skyline:
But what if you actually wanted to see the foliage in front of you? We can in real life and isn’t that the scene the one the caught your eye in the first place, the REAL LIFE scene? The problem is that most films and sensors have a hard time collecting that 5 to 7 stop range that is presenting before you. Some digital sensors are coming close, especially in RAW mode but they just aren’t going to match what the human eye and brain sees. What you may want is your scene to look like this:
How do we do it? Lets start in the field. I’m not going to give a lecture of exposure right now (though I am sure I will in the future), so I am not going to tell you how to expose each frame in a given landscape but just to tell you that you will want about three bracketed frames; one that is under exposed or exposed for the shadows, one that is exposed somewhere in middle ground (in the above example I exposed for the foliage in the lower right hand corner), and one that is over exposed or exposed for the highlights.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that all three images need to be identically composed so it goes without saying that a tripod is paramount. I should also mention that this is not strictly a digital technique. If you shoot film and scan your photos or negatives, this technique will work for you also. Which brings me to the next stage; get your images on a computer. Once in there, in the old magic number cruncher, open photoshop.
Now you don’t actually need open any file in particular with Photoshop, you just need to go to File → Automate → Merge to HDR.
In the resulting window you’ll select the files you wish to merge, where a minimum of two are required but more often then not, three or more would be used. Now all that’s left to do is click “OK” and watch the magic.
Be warned that your results may vary and the resulting file may need further tweaking with contrast, gamma, saturation etc, but it is a start and takes a large brunt of the work off of you. Just as an experiment I tried to attempt a manual merge of these images myself and in the hands of a proper graphic artist, the task would not be impossible, but to accomplish the same results in the 30 seconds that Photoshop can spit these things out would be.