It’s January 1st, 2019, and I’ve decided to do a project 365 this year. Now I’m not saying that I will absolutely definitely create an image every single day of the year, because I know that won’t happen. I will, however, commit to creating 365 images during this year, and I will try to create seven images per week. In doing this, I’m trying to give myself the drive to have at least one photographic session per week, and hopefully seven presentable images will result from each. That will be quite challenging for me, since I’m usually happy with just a couple of decent images from a session, and it’s not uncommon for me to be unhappy with my shots generally and hit the delete button on them all…but we’ll see how it goes.
Just before Christmas, I got a Canon EF-S 60mm F2.8 Macro lens, which I’ve been eyeing for quite a while now. Today, January 1st, was the first opportunity I’ve had to get it out of the box and have an initial play. I’ve done a little close-up photography in the past, using extension tubes and magnification filters, but this is the first time I’ve owned a true 1:1 Macro lens. Time to see how accurate the many reviews I have read are…
With a couple of tiny Egyptian Starflowers and a stalk of grass seed plucked from the garden, I laid them out on a black sheet on the patio table, set up my tripod and got myself a coffee.
The trouble with macro work, of course, is the extremely limited depth-of-field you have at close focus distances…in this case approximately 15cm / 6 inches away from the subject. The depth of field is so narrow that you can’t get all of the flower in focus at one time, even with this tiny flower which is only about 10mm in diameter. This gives advantages, in that you can easily get wonderful out of focus backgrounds and foregrounds allowing you to highlight your subject very well. It also gives the disadvantage that you often can’t get all of your subject in focus at one time. In this case, I couldn’t get the tiny stamen to be sharply focussed at the same time as the bowl of the flower head, despite them being only 3-4mm apart, so limited is the depth-of-field. I found that at the widest aperture of F2.8, it was impossible to achieve any kind of acceptable result with this subject at all, and had to stop down to F8 to get almost enough depth-of-field to be able to produce an acceptable result. By that time, the shutter speed had dropped so low in the overcast daylight today, that I was down to 1/15th of a second, and even with the gentle breeze, my subject was moving slightly and my subject was blurred. Adding a large book as a windshield worsened the lighting, so in the end, I resorted to setting up a remote flash unit and reflector, sending light from above and slightly to one side, from roughly where the daylight source was, and I was able to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the subject.
These three images are my favourites from this half hour shoot. The first one I’m very happy with the composition, and it is my first image in Project 365, 2019. The other two, I’m less happy with the composition, but I am delighted with the sharpness of the lens. Only very slight sharpening has been applied to these shots in Lightroom. I also know that I will look back at these shots in days or weeks or months, and be less happy with them. But…I am new to macro, and it’s a learning curve, and it’s always been that way with photography for me as I develop and learn.
The lessons I’ve taken away from today are that setting up an indoor macro studio for this kind of thing is probably close to essential. Being able to eliminate movement from the wind would allow multiple exposures, and that in turn will allow me to experiment with exposure blending and focus stacking, so that I can combine exposures in post-production to achieve sharpness over all the areas of the image that I want it. There is much to learn, and I look forward to experimenting and sharing it here.
I’ll do a full review of the Canon EF-S 60mm F2.8 when I’ve used it long enough, but my first impressions are that it’s crisp and sharp, even at F2.8, and it feels solid and well built. Current new price is around $580 Australian…around $415 US.
Happy New Year.
Shoot The Adventure 