Experimenting with macro

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 09:57pm

At the camera club last night we were discussing macro. After a discussion on what macro is and the various ways of achieving it (macro lens, extension tubes, a close up lens, reversing the lens, etc) we broke out and started to shoot the variety of items that were brought along.

I don’t have a macro lens, but I was able to borrow a set of Kenko extension tubes which I used with my 50mm lens. I didn’t keep many shots from the night, but I started out shooting a Dandelion clock lit by an external light:

Parachutes

With the extension tubes using autofocus was pointless so I switched to manual and focused by moving the entire camera back and forth. I also quickly switched to using and off camera flash (triggered by an ST-E2 so I had TTL)

Dandelion clock

However, I found that shooting the flash through the object from below gave more interesting results:

Clock lit from below Feather
Tiny flower Open the pod bay doors, HAL

Although these are quite interesting and deserve further experimentation, my favourite shot was more conventionally lit:

Mmmm... Gooey.

Of course to experiment further I will need some more equipment. While I cannot justify an actual macro lens, a set of Kenko extension tubes are quite affordable…

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