Macro musings – Part the Second

I’ve recently purchased a Cygnustech flash diffuser to help with my macro photography.  It came from Australia pretty quickly, and was custom-made for my flash, lens, and camera body setup.  My home-made diffuser was OK, but not quite good enough.

One of the issues with using an on-camera flash for close-up/macro photography is that the direction of the flash is wrong, as the light mostly goes past the subject.  The other issue is that light from a bare flash head is very directional and gives hard shadows and specular reflections.  For shiny insects that’s not good lighting.

The diffuser solves the problems by directing the light to the subject and by spreading the light out so it hits the subject from lots of directions.  This Green Shield bug looks as if it’s been shot on a cloudy day with diffuse light, but it was shot using the flash diffuser.

This Garden Spider*, (Araneus diadematus), with its fly prey was also shot using the diffuser, but this time it’s a focus stack of eight images rather than being a single shot.  Balancing the flash exposure so the background isn’t dark is part of the challenge.

* I hadn’t noticed it had lost a leg until I edited the images!

No diffuser here as the image was shot in bright sunlight.  This is a buff-tailed bumble bee, (bombus terrestris), that’s just taken off from a rose flower.  I used my OM-1 with Pro Capture SH1, (120 frames/sec), and a shutter speed of 1/3200 sec.  The shutter speed was just about short enough to stop the wing movement.

I talk about this, and many other things, in my “Close-up and Macro Photography” talk to clubs and groups.