If you’re into macro photography, sooner or later you’ll run into a subject that will benefit from a little more control in the setting, angles, and lighting than you can accomplish ‘in the field,’ and you’ll want to do some studio work. The good news is, setting up a macro studio can often be done in minutes with simple materials. The bad news is,
Tag: macro photography
Tip Jar 37: Macro options
While macro photography can be fun and fascinating, it does require at least a little specialized equipment. Dedicated macro lenses tend to be quite expensive, and while they remain the best way to tackle the genre, there are other options. But first, let’s see why they’re usually the best option.
Full range of focus. Macro lenses can usually focus from 15cm, give or
Yeah, “playing”
I was about to title this post, “Just playing,” because it was a quick effort to get a few clear closeups of a jagged ambush bug (Genus Phymata,) but considering the number of frames that I shot trying to get these, it hardly counts as foolin’ around. It was also intended as a lead-in to a further bit of news, but that hasn’t been done yet, so here we are.
Magic Bucket tiger trap
It’s been a while since the Magic Bucket of Variety has caught anything more than beetles, and in fact, it’ll be a while longer, since this is a beetle. But it’s a beetle I haven’t seen before, so it’s getting featured here.
I knew right away this was a tiger beetle, since they have some distinctive traits like the spots on the abdomen and the eyes and
Where’s that thesaurus?
Welcome back to Tiny Tuesday, where we— wait, what day is it? They all run together. Minuscule Monday? No, it’s Sunday, so that makes it… hold on now…
Anyway, while you’re shouting out answers, we’ll plow ahead with two miniature subjects for today – one The Girlfriend pointed out to me, and one I had waiting in the wings that I decided to tackle after the
Hope you don’t want February, ’cause we’re out
Or at least, we will be in less than 24 hours. Indeed, this one almost snuck up on me, since I wasn’t aware of how fast the month was passing. I had the beginning of March pegged for removing some of the plants from the greenhouse, and that’s tomorrow. Sheesh.
We also know what that means, so let’s see what we’ve accomplished on the abstract front, shall we?
I
Getting short with you
The other day I was experimenting again, and dug out the old Sigma 105mm 2.8 macro lens, my main macro provider until it quit unexpectedly about 16 years ago (!), in two ways. The first was that autofocus got very balky, likely due to a stripped focus gear, though I have no idea how that happened. I did indeed do this on my own with another lens, by inadvertently leaning the focus ring against a
Macro photography, part 14: Selective pressures
The pursuit of the ideal softbox for flash macro photography has been going on for a while now, with many iterations, and now we have another. The last version took advantage of being able to hash out and 3D-print a design more optimized for the purpose, because I now could, but I realized after a
Suddenly, autumn
Not really, but last night the temperature dropped more than it had in weeks, coupled with high humidity, and dew formed with a vengeance, which we also hadn’t seen in weeks – it doesn’t often hit the dewpoint overnight in summer here. And so, there were a couple of subjects to be found because of this.
The Girlfriend and I had seen this eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica)
Estate Find XXIV
This Estate Find might set the record for the most frames taken to capture what I was after, but that’s because I was after some pretty specific things that are very hard to see, from a subject that’s difficult to work with.
In the past week, as if a switch has been thrown, there’s a section of the property that sports large numbers of this week’s find, which could be a lot