Macro Photography

I have always been intrigued by the art of closeup photography.  When I graduated high school my mother got me a Canon AE-1 Program SLR as a graduation present.  Once I could afford it, I bought a bellows unit for it and tried to shoot macro photos.  Using a bellows is one way to go about shooting macros and I thought this would be what I would use now that I have a digital SLR.  It turns out that bellows units for today's SLR cameras are hard to come by, at least the Nikon one is, so I needed to go a different route.  After much procrastination on the subject I finally decided to go ahead  and buy Nikon's 105 mm Micro lens.  This is arguably the best choice for a macro capable lens in the Nikon line of digital SLRs or so says the photography community online.



The lens arrived on Thursday and I quickly mounted it to my camera and took it out on the deck for some test shots while I cooked dinner on the grill.  As we sat down to eat I couldn't help but try a close up shot of my glass of beer!  The lens is also very popular for portrait photography as 105 mm (especially on a full frame sensor) is a very good length for portraits.  To test this theory out I grabbed a quick candid of my daughter Kristina as she sat at the dining room table.  This new lens will give me plenty of opportunity to capture some last minute photos for this blog as there is always something that will look very interesting when photographed up close.  With this in mind I wondered what I would shoot for my first macro post to this web site.  My initial plan was to collect a bunch of snail shells and arrange them in a cluster and see how it turned out. But then I had other idea.

I have read a lot about a technique known as focus stacking that is done to help improve the shallow depth of field you get with extreme closeup photography.  What this entails is taking several exposures at slightly different focus points starting at the closest point on the subject and slowing focusing on things sli
ghtly farther away.  I tried this Saturday on a yellow flower from a bouquet of flowers that we had in the house.  It seemed to work fairly well.   Then later that evening as I opened up the umbrella on the deck, I noticed a rather large bug attached to the under side.  Once we (OK, once Amy) got the bug off the umbrella we realized it was dead or at least it seemed dead.  We left it lying on the deck and it was still there this afternoon.  I decided to take it down into the basement where my studio lights are setup and see how god a picture I could get with it using this focus stacking scheme.  This gave me three candidates for this week's choice and given that they were all pretty good I decided to stick with the original plan and use the snail shells.  I hope you like it along with the others in this post.