Tripod or Valium - The Thing about Macro

So this is the very first image, that i shot last summer with my new macro lens, the Canon EF-S 60mm 1:2,8 Makro. I remember this day very well. I unboxed the lens and went straight down to the Talvera, one of three rivers that run through Bolzano. On the rivershore i started chasing any kind of insects: ants, flies, bees, wasps and little birds (yes, i'm aware that they're not insects ;)

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On this trip, i learned several things about macro:

1) Bring a tripod or take a valium

What i didn't realize at first was how difficult it is to get a good macro shot without a tripod.

- In general i'm not very fond of tripods, mainly because of their weight and handling issues - But in macro photography, it can be really essential to avoid camera shake when you do a hand shoot. Since you get so close to your subject, every little movement translates into a big shake in your frame causing motion blur. You can either avoid this with a tripod, or hold your breath like i did. If the lighting conditions are good, you can get away with holding your breath ;)

2) Search for "friendly models"

Nonetheless, after 20 minutes i got some fair shots of the fly in the picture. It was very polite, because it held still for periods of like 1 or 2 seconds. What i mean with "friendly models" is that there are animals which almost never stay still (like wasps, ants, etc.) <-- those are difficult models. And there are animals that don't move fast and are easier to capture (like caterpillars, butterflies and this very fly here), which are, as i call them, "friendly models".

3) Forget autofocus

The third thing i learned on this day is that you can forget your autofocus if you shoot macro. This has nothing to do with the quality of the lens, it's just that you're shooting in a very deep depth of field in comparison to your distance to the object. Sure, if you take enough shots, there will be some photos with good focus, but i really would advise to switch to manual focus in this case. It gives you a much higher "right-on-the-spot-rate" and always works great for me.

4) Don't hang on to very large apertures (small f-stops), you get bokeh anyway

This is again a matter of depth of field (DOF). Since you are so close to your "model", the DOF is quite deep, so that your image overall won't be very sharp with an f/2.8. Moreover, in macro photography you often want to display very fine details (like wing structure of flies), which is just not possible with a large aperture. This image was shot at an aperture of f/7.1 and i still got a dreamy bokeh because my motive is so far away from its background.

5) ISO is your best friend

Yes, i'm also one the people who would rather always shoot at ISO 100 because i hate noise, but in macro i must admit, pumping up the ISO really saves some pictures.

This image was shoot in natural light with the following settings:

ISO 800

f/7.1

1/500s

Now imagine the natural lighting conditions would be worse, i would have to adjust my camera settings. With a slower shutterspeed i could gain additional light, but since my model likes to move, i can't go down without risking motion blur. With a larger aperture (smaller f-stop) i would also win some light back, but i would pay this light with sharpness in details. So in this case, going up with the ISO is the best price-performance-ratio, at least in my eyes.

So, that's it from me, i hope you can take away a bit about macro, without having to spend a day on the rivershore and getting bitten by mosquitos!

Shooting HDR

HDR

I shot it in HDR (High Dynamic Range), which means it was originally three separate images. Maybe you've heard already of HDR, it is a technique which allows you to squeeze every little detail out of your scenery by merging different photos of the exact same frame with different exposures. Usually, you take one photo with correct exposure, one under- and one overexposed.

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This is the beautiful little church of Glurns, a little yet famous village in Val Venosta.

Shoot at a constant aperture

The Exif-data for this image were an aperture of f.5 with a focal length of 18mm. I would have liked to even go up to f.11 to get more natural depth of field, but since I had no tripod with me, the lighting conditions forced me to go down. Now, the very important part is to shoot each of the three images with a constant aperture. Otherwise your images will have a different depth of field, which means you cannot merge them together accurately. This also implies that for HDR you cannot use the automatic mode or the "P"-mode on your camera, because the camera would of course decide to change the aperture in order to avoid very low shutterspeeds.

Which camera mode?

You can do it in manual mode ("M"), but i prefer to shoot in aperture priority mode ("Av" for Canon, "A" for Nikon) because it is less work. In aperture priority mode you only tell the camera to shoot at a certain aperture and let it balance itself the rest of the settings for a correct exposure. Furthermore, you can rely on your camera to adapt also the ISO (when set to auto) and save you some shutter-time.

How?

Most modern DSRL-cameras have a so called "auto-bracketing"-mode which alters the shutterspeed settings automatically for you (once you've definded them in the program), if you just press the shutterbutton long enough. The camera then takes 3 to 5 images directly after one another, so that these kind of shots can also be done hand hold if the lighting conditions are somewhat fair.

So for this image, the shutterspeed of course varied in all three pictures, so that I could shoot one image with correct exposure, one underexposed with -2 and one overexposed with +2.

Reveal details

The underexposed picture reveals all the details in the highlights that otherwise would be blown out at a normal exposure (which didn't exist in this case, because it was quite dark). The overexposed picture does exactly the opposite and reveals structure in the shadows.

Software

The three pictures were processed in Google's HDR Efex Pro (former Nik Software) which is a Photoshop plugin, but there are many more programs (also standalone) that can do this. I think the softwares which are used the most are Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro. For this final look, I reduced the noise and pumped up colors and contrast in Photoshop - and Voilà!

When to shoot HDR?

Predestined HDR-Situations are relatively easy to define. It's exactly those situations in which you normally wouldn't shoot, because the light is too dark, too bright, too sunny, too contrasty - so every situation in which you know your camera reaches its limits. In those cases you can always "cheat" by shooting 3 instead of 1 image!

HDR-Look

This is always a hot discussed topic, but i personally think that HDR is a great technique to get even more control over the look of your pictures. Sure, in the web there are also a lot of overdone examples, just google "hdr" ;), but I personally think that it can get you a great look, if you know how to balance it!

We all get a little crazy at first, don't we? ;)

Sunken Church in Lago di Resia

Everyone knows the famous Lago di Resia (Reschensee) located near the border between Italy and Suisse in the South Tyrolean Val Venosta. I wanted to go there for a long time and see the sunken villages Curon Venosta and Resia with my own eyes.

When we arrived, I was very surprised that the steeple was pretty near to the lakeshore. In all the pictures I've seen, it seemed like it were right in the middle. But as you can see, with a wide-angle lens I created the same effect.

It was freezing cold - the sea is at 1498m above sea level - but the sun was shining and the water had that beautiful green color. With an aperture of 11 I got those nice sunrays and lensflares.

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You Want Sunrays? You Get Sunrays!

Do you sometimes see pictures in which the sun has these nice rays and they're exactly looking like we drew them in kindergarden?

Yes, me too, and i always think "it really makes a good photo look great". The sunrays, together with the lensflares, give your image instantly that kind of warmth and coziness - even if it's a winter wonderland like this.

So, how can you do it yourself?

First of all, anybody who has a camera with a manual mode can do it! The only three things you need is control over shutterspeed, aperture and ISO.

Small aperture

The key setting here, is to set a small aperture (big f-stop number) like f/11 or higher. Maybe you've already noticed yourself, if you take a picture with the sun at a large aperture like f/2.8 for instance, your sun is looking like a diffuse white area and the lensflares are undefined and superbig. 

But if you instead set your aperture to a value of 8+, your sun takes shape. Notice that the smaller your aperture, the finer and longer will your sunrays get and the more angled your lensflares will become. The effect will vary depending on the lens you use, but try around between f/11 and f/22 and you should get great results.

And there's another thing to take care of...

Mind your exposure

A common piece of photographer's wisdom is "don't shoot into the sun". In my opinion, this is only true for people who photograph in Auto-mode. Yes, if you're shooting directly into the sun, your camera is literally overwhelmed by all the light and is likely to underexpose your photo because it tries to compensate. 

But there are several ways out of this issue:

1) Use your camera exposure-correction

You can manually set the exposure settings, so that your camera overexposes in regard to its normal settings, which in turn balances the underexposure.

2) Use flash

If you're shooting a model or an object reasonable close to the lens, you can always use your flash to adjust the lighting conditions. If your focus is set properly, your camera will automatically adapt.

3) Shoot in HDR

This is what I did in this image. To get instructions on how to shoot HDR, have a look at this post. You basically shoot 3 or more photos of the same frame with different exposures, so that your computer can later compose the three exposures and pick the best parts of each shot.

And here are the Exif-data:

ISO 100, f/11 at three different shutterspeeds. Here are the three original pictures:

Now have fun shooting sunny pictures ;)