I was pretty happy with this picture of some hyperia amphipods on a pacific lion’s mane jelly. It turned out very good.
I also like this dragonfly photo. It wasn’t bad at all for a smartphone camera.
I have several photos I am somewhat proud of, heres a couple:
To this day, my only copperhead
I also quite like this Gorge Rhododendron photo of mine
And this landscape shot of a valley (tulip tree in bottom left :) )
I love the wasp moth. That’s a really cool insect.
I really like these photos because I’ve always wanted to take a photo of a jumping spider with its eyes visible, but they always move too much for my clip-on macro lens and my phone. But this time, this spider stayed still and I was able to do it.
Are you using the built-in pop-up camera flash or an external unit mounted in the flash shoe? Or?
Lens shadow won’t necessarily be fixed by just a diffuser if the macro lens is too long.
A note about stacking. Some newer cameras can do this without external software, to some extent. But no matter how you do it, it takes longer to take multiple shots to stack than just a single shot. Moving subjects are next to impossible to capture.
I also have had and used 4K video ‘scans’ of a subject to get high res video frames to stack. Here’s a couple of examples. Fly with my phone and a clip-on ‘microscope’ and lacewing with my Nikon P950.
The built-in flash. The diffusers I’ve seen others make are designed to bounce the light up and over the lens (hence the spatial reasoning issues), and usually incorporate white cardboard or foamboard.
Using the built-in flashes is a real hassle with long lenses. In particular making it ‘climb’ higher to get over the flash. Sometimes a simple piece of white paper or one of those cheap ‘fits in your pocket’ coiled wire/fabric diffusers can do the job of getting around the lens, but what I don’t like about those is that they kind of get in the way – in close quarters.
Also, if your macro lens has a decent lens-to-subject focus distance, you can still get around the lens shadow without any extra tricks. Maybe just some frosted transparent tape over the camera’s flash glass.
Lately, what I’ve been using instead of a flash gets around the lens shadow problem AND the ability to find the subject in very dim areas, and even for video. I bought a 28W flash-shoe mounted LED flood light that I use to look around first, and then for the shot as well. This much light in a small area makes it quite workable. This light cost my less than $30 new and is rechargeable. You can even use the lamp’s built-in battery as an external USB power source for recharging in a pinch (500maH).
Something like this:
The light allows for some colour and level adjusting, but mostly I just leave it on full strength which is good for about 20 minutes before it dims down to the next level notch (there are 4). I keep the ISO high to allow me to keep the f stop high too and a decent speed of say 1/300 or 1/400. I don’t worry so much about ISO noise because I shoot RAW and there are amazing apps that will clean all that right out.
As for a flash hood on a shoed-in flash, I have ended up using mostly this diffuser/reflector setup – the kind of frosted slip on flash head polypropylene diffuser just slips on, and the white ‘angled’ diffuser’ attaches to the flash with a velcro strap. It works very well. And stores flat for travel, etc. Combined these set me back about $12 new.
This is my favorite forum conversation. I can’t keep up on all the “likes” I want to register!
I was pretty happy with this one.
You should be! The water droplets take the photo from ‘nice’ to ‘wonderful’.
