Macro
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I spied a spider – or four
OK, I know they aren’t insects, as the tags might have you believe, but spiders are great subjects, as long as you can get close enough to them. One of my favourites, as we see them round the house a lot, is the Fleecy Jumping Spider. They are really very small. Females, like this one, can reach just 5mm long. I’ve used my Cygnustech flash diffuser to give lots of soft light, and focus-stacked nine images to give better depth of field. This one’s on a vertical white-painted wall. This one’s on the same wall, but I lit it with an LED torch almost parallel to the wall’s surface to…
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Welcome to 2025!
Firstly, HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know we are nearly a week into the new year, but it needed to be said. One of the photographic highlights of the Christmas period was the Christmas Tree Festival at Worcester Cathedral. It’s a fabulous display of lots and lots of Christmas tree decorated by loads of different organisations. There are, of course, lots of tree lights to be played with. Here I’ve chosen a tree that had lots of lights on and used OM System’s “Live Composite” mode set on a 1/2 second base exposure. I rotated the camera in a circle during the exposure. There are some interesting colours and shapes, and…
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Happy Christmas!
As it’s less than a couple of weeks till Xmas Day I thought I would take the opportunity to wish you all a “Merry Christmas and a Phabulously Photographic New Year”. It’s been an interesting year for me, with lots of in-person and Zoom talks and well-received Macro workshops. I’ve already got talk bookings for 2026! This is a macro bokeh shot of an Xmas tree bauble. Not only is there foreground bokeh but there’s also wider background bokeh. It’s like differential focus, but it’s all actually out of focus! Our neighbour over the road has a log-burning stove. One quite windy day it was smoking quite a lot, and…
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Macro musings – Part the Third
The Macro workshops I’m running locally are happening very soon. To help with those workshops I asked OM Systems if they would lend me one of their fabulous 90mm Pro Macro lenses, and they very kindly obliged. You can see the OM Systems range of camera and lenses here. I have no commercial relationship with OM Systems, I just love their cameras and lenses. It’s a super sharp lens that has a native 2x life-size magnification ratio. I, of course, wondered what it looked like when it was out of focus. I tested that on a cold morning when our windows had condensation on the inside. Shooting from the inside…
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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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Textures of Gower
Just had a week down in wonderful Gower, South Wales. It’s got fabulous coastal scenery, wildlife*, and a really wide range of habitats. Being me, as well as enjoying those things I was on the look out for textures and patterns; I found some too. The bus to Rhossili from Swansea has a turning area near the church. It couldn’t really go much further without driving into the sea. There’s a bus shelter there and someone, or something, must have hit the roof of it quite hard as the reinforced glass was shattered. There was a fab pattern of random cracks overlaying the internal wires. A quick move to…
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May miscellany
No real theme this time, though you could argue it’s a people picture sequence that goes; close-up, full length, multiple figures. The close-up is of a person’s eye shot with my super useful Bauhn clip-on mobile phone macro lens. The lens has a built-in ring light, so it’s great for adding light to areas when the phone shadows the available light. I like the reflection of their eyelashes in their cornea. This is a bit of street photography in the delightful Pitville, a part of Cheltenham. This Barbie mural on the side of a building in Pitville Park, was really long. It’s a bit of an odd subject, as it’s…
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Spring has sprung
Spring has most definitely sprung here in Worcester, notwithstanding all the rain we’ve had. One thing that’s happened locally is that the Cathedral has restarted tower visits after a four year hiatus. I was the first person to book a tower visit ticket and it’s well worth doing. On the way back down the tower I noticed an overwintered Peacock butterfly that was next to an unopenable window. The butterfly had no chance of getting out without help, so I picked it up between my index finger and thumb and took it carefully down the stairs, through the nave and out into the open. After a minute or so on…
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Focus on your focus
Cameras these days are like science fiction devices compared to when I first started taking pictures. Back then everything was manual; setting the exposure, focusing, film winding. Now we have all these wonderful automatic tools at our disposal, and auto focus has come on in leaps and bounds since the first, rather clunky, iterations. That does not mean that it’s foolproof, nor does it mean that you should just let it do its work without any input from you. Here are three examples of different focus issues. Some auto focus systems need edge contrast to do their job, and when there’s not much edge contrast they can hunt around for…