Equipment
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Spring has sprung
It’s nearly May, and here in leafy Worcester everything wild is going at a very rapid pace. The birds are singing like mad, and creatures like toads are well out of hibernation. I found this one perched on top of an old tree stump in the garden. The stump is covered by our wheelbarrow – upside down – and I’ve seen a toad on the tree stump before. I had my OM System 40-150 Pro lens fitted, which was perfect for an informal portrait. The eyes are good and sharp, which is an important thing in portrait photography. I’ve been experimenting with capturing small insects in flight. It’s really hard…
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60mm plus 30mm = 90mm
They say that “nature’s red in tooth and claw”. That indicates that everything is struggling to survive against lots of potential predators. I saw this little vignette happening outside one of our windows. A honey bee was caught in a spider’s web. The spider is probably a Noble False Widow, and it was just doing what spiders do to carry on living. I shot through the double glazing with my 60 mm OM macro lens. The background is well out of focus, as it was quite a long way away. Later the bee and spider were to be seen tucked up in the corner of the window, almost out of…
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Just how much lens do you need?
At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging. One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images. The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines. My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape. Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source. I recalled that I had some loose…
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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…
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Macro musings
I’m running a couple of Macro photography workshops for a local photographic club soon, so what better subject than that for today’s blog post? At the workshop I will demonstrate how everyday objects are perfect subjects for Macro images. Here’s an example of such an everyday object. It’s the hook part of a Velcro strap on a wrist support I was wearing. I used a head torch behind the Velcro as my light source and this gave a cool spotlight look to the image. To my mind there’s a bit of “Blade Runner” grime/abandonment to it. The direction that the light comes from makes a huge difference to images. This…
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Through a glass darkly
I have a “deceptive” glass in my small collection of interesting glasses. A deceptive glass has very thick sidewalls, and thus holds much less liquid than it appears to when filled. In Georgian times coaching inns had them. A coach would stop, passengers would rush in for a quick drink and be given it in a deceptive glass. They paid for a full normal glassful of course! I looked at the glass with its thick walls and thought, “That might act as a lens”! My camera was fitted with the Oly 60mm macro lens, so I just held the glass up against the UV filter on the front of that…
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Macro Mayhem
A generous friend gave me a bellows attachment. Bellows allow you to get the lens away from the camera body, and this gives you more magnification. It was made for an M42 screw-thread mount camera system (think 1950/60’s Pentax or Praktica), so making it work with my Olympus MFT system needed an adapter. Having done a few trial images I decided to “go big or go home” and stuck on some extension tubes (two lots of two) as well. Oh, and I also fitted my Olympus 1.4x teleconverter. The converter is not designed to do this, but it fits if you are careful. It ended up being quite a long…