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photography

Photography

Macro lenses

Posted on April 28, 2012

Those who have been paying attention for a year or more will have noticed that I’ve tried just about every technique for doing macro photography that didn’t involve actually buying a macro lens. The only macro lens for my camera system is the Panasonic Leica 45mm, a lens that I’m sure is absolutely lovely if not for the heavy $1200 price tag on it. I’m really enjoying miniature photography, but I’m not enjoying it to the tune of that price!

The first plan was reversing the lens. There are reversal adapters you can buy, but this was such a shitty solution that it didn’t merit any more thought. Next I bought an extension tube, a $20 investment that did ok, but my selection of lenses at the time didn’t have enough range – just about every photo had the subject almost touching the lens. Lastly I picked up the Panasonic 100-300m. Combined with the extension tubes, this did a decent job. I had to hold the massive lens+adapter rig, and I still didn’t have auto-focus or aperture control, but it produced acceptable photos.

I was reading a photography blog and after a conversation with the author, it turns out that if you use an adapter, all Four Thirds lenses are compatible with my Micro Four Thirds camera, with electronic control and everything. The downside is that autofocus was “very slow”, whatever that meant. With this information, now I had a whole new system of lenses that I could look at!

I ended up Craigslisting an Olympus MMF-2 adapter for $80, and picked up the much more reasonably priced Olympus 35mm macro for 43 (only $230!) and now, finally, I have a fully functioning macro photography system.

It’s a little slow on the focus though. Thankfully, miniatures don’t move around so I can afford to wait. I played with it tonight a bit, and it’s wonderful to use! Set apertures for depth of field, pin-point exactly where I want the auto-focus to sharpen, and my tripod can hold the entire rig up! Now I need more lights…and a good place to put them.

I’ll have some photos to share sometime this weekend, but for now…sleep!

Photography

Macro photography! (for realz, kinda)

Posted on October 26, 2011

I ordered a set of macro extension tubes for my camera. They are just an adapter that puts extra space between the lens and the camera body, which brings the focal point closer to the end of the lens. There are three different tubes, marked 28mm, 14mm and 7mm. As well you can go without a tube, which I called 0mm (but it really still a fair distance). If you desire, you can add them together to go further.

There is no electrical connection on these tubes, which means that auto-focus and aperture settings are completely unavailable. You focus by moving the focus ring on the lens, or by…moving the camera closer and further away from the subject :). The aperture is wide-open and you can’t change that, which has some ramifications.

This lets you take photos of things much closer up!

A few things I learned:

  • You have to use each marked tube section individually. Starting with 28+14+7mm total is veeeery blurry.
  • Because the aperture is wide open, the only way to change it is to change lenses. My 28mm Prime is f/2.5 wide open, and my 28mm-82mm is f/3.5-f/5.6.
  • The f/2.5 is a lot brighter, so I was able to take photos a little faster and reduce motion blur. But you also get a much shallower depth of field, so only small sections of the photo can be in focus at once.
  • The 28mm-82mm is best used at full zoom so that the lens can be further away from the target, so you can get more light on the target. Because it’s f/5.6 at full zoom, you need a lot of light!

What this means is that where in most situations a bright lens is better, here it might be better to get a longer zoom so that you can get further away so as to not bump into the target, with a higher minimum aperture so that you can get more target into the depth of field.

Here’s some photos to hopefully illustrate. I took a head shot and then a series of gun shots – I could get the lens closer to the gun so it was generally a better picture.

[You can click on the photos to open up larger versions. Be warned – they are LARGE versions – 4000×3000]

28mm lens/7mm macro. A couple really close images. Still to short a focus depth.
28mm lens/0mm macro. I took a series of photos of the tank of the flamer to illustrate how shallow the depth of field is on the 28mm f/2.5. Watch as the sharp part of the image moves towards the back of the tank.
82mm lens/28mm macro. This distance was largely unusable – I couldn’t get the camera close enough to the face to be able to take a non-blurry photo.
82mm lens/14mm macro. Still closer.
82mm lens/7mm macro. Closer…
82mm lens/0mm macro. Closer than the camera usually is able to get, but still pretty far away. This isn’t bad.

I like learning new things. 😀

Photography

“Macro photography”

Posted on October 3, 2011

While this is a painting-blog, I feel as though it’s also got a minor in being a photo-blog. I’m taking photos of models, so while I can have the most beautiful model on the planet (still working on that part…), if the photo I’ve taken of that model is crap then the output will look like crap. Which means that the subject of photography is entirely on-topic :).

With the new camera (Panasonic GF3), now I have some options. Buuuuut the macro lens that I’m looking at is $1200 new…(one on Craigslist for $650, but that’s still a little much >.<), so I was looking at other options.

Two things I found. First, you can get “extension tubes” which go between your camera and any regular lens. When you pull the lens away from the camera, it brings the focal point closer to the lens, which means you can get much closer. I’m told that the optics suffer slightly, but if I could find an inexpensive tube it might be worth the trouble. Right now, the best option is to buy an M4/3->X adapter and then buy a cheap X-mount lens and use that. I’m not a huge fan of this…since the expensive part would be the lens, but I really only want the tube!

Reading some more last night, I found another idea…but it’s not a good idea for general-purpose photography! Apparently you can take your lens off the camera and switch it around and it will act very macro-y. So I gave it a try to see what that looked like – very cool! (A few warnings: you have to hold your lens in place, you can get dust on the insides of your lens or mirror/sensor of your camera. Don’t do this if you’re paranoid about those things).

[You can click on the photos to open up larger versions. Be warned – they are LARGE versions – 4000×3000]

I also like how in some of these photos, I’m close enough that you can see the “bubbles” of paint – this isn’t good, you want a smooth finish :).
I took a few of these face photos. Each time, my hand moved a little bit and so the depth-of-field changed slightly. Each photo has something entirely different in sharp focus.
I switched to the 14-42 in the reverse position and then moved the zoom to it’s longest extension. This let me get a little further from the model, so I could get more light onto the model so I could step everything else down.
I turned up the aperture on the camera for this one, as well as the exposure value, to make it a little brighter. If the aperture is actually adjusted on the lens…what does the aperture setting do when the camera can’t talk to the lens?
I tried first with the 14mm. An issue was that the lens had to get so close to the model that most of the light was blocked.
This is the closest that my 14-42mm lens can get in the normal configuration while still having the entire model in focus. Also, this model was just sitting on my desk – not the best paint job (but not bad either :)).
Close up of my lens cap. 14mm F2.5

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Photography

Miniature Photography

Posted on June 25, 2010

I’ve got about 7 photos to show here, so I’m going to put it behind a cut to pretend to save peoples bandwidths.

The topic for today is “playing with miniature photography”. As I mentioned, I went to my dads and his camera is a lot nicer than mine, so we got some interesting photos. My dad decided to take a bunch of photos in a row, with some different settings, so we’ll take a look at some of those photos and see about what difference those settings do.

Continue Reading

Photography

Photography

Posted on June 14, 2010

My post titles are so descriptive and original…

So I bought a Photo Studio in a Bag from ThinkGeek a week ago in an attempt, as promised, to increase the quality of the photos that I’m posting (without spending a lot of money).

You can see the first attempt at this already in the Temple Guard 3 post. A few things to note:

  • Having 2 lights does not absolve you of needing to have the 3rd light – oh, like, say the freaking sun – to make it look good. Taking photos at 11:30 at night isn’t a good plan.
  • To try to solve this, I took the default setup of having the two lights diffuse through the mesh and just aimed them into the big hole of the white box directly at the model. The first photo was taken with them diffusing, the second with them aimed directly. I like the second better (still needs the sun or more light…).
  • The tripod was next to useless. It’s too tall! The macro mode on my camera requires that the object be directly in front of the lens, not a foot away. In macro mode it would only focus as a blurry gray thing against a white background. In normal mode, once you got close enough using the zoom it would still be a blurry gray thing. So I had to bring the model closer to the entrance of the white box, and then hold the camera. Feels like it needs a pedestal or something.
  • Curious cat is curious. Keep the cat out of the white box!
  • The white box is folded up and kept in a black nylon case in a very clever manner. If you’ve worked with well-read computer programmers at all, you may know that clever is a euphemism for “we’ll never figure it out again”. It’s a 3 mesh panels with solid metal frames holding their shape. Those metal frames fold into a space about an eighth their normal size. I fold origami dinosaurs regularly, and this just continues to blow my mind.
  • Something else that just occurred to me. I need a macro mode that also has aperture configuration. I was wondering why, in the sample photo, you can’t see the background. The reason is that when you set your aperture high, as you are supposed to for models, the background becomes blurry and the object you are focusing on becomes offset from the background. But since I have an Aperture Mode and a Macro Mode on my little point’n’shoot of awesomeness I don’t have the choice of both.

Thanks for reading!

Work-in-progress

Lava

Posted on June 6, 2010

Photography+internet is a little odd to me. I feel like, if I can look at a picture, I should be able to distribute that picture. I mean…I’ve got it already. It’s on my hard drive, being displayed by my monitor. And yet I get the feeling (was unable to confirm) that it’s probably against the rules to take those photos on your computer and to use them directly. (This can be contrasted with movies/games/music, where you have to actively search for them to get them onto your computer, so you can steal them.)

Did you know that “smoldering lava” is the name of a particular card in the Molten Core raid deck from the WoW:TCG? I didn’t, but now I do, since that’s a good portion of what a Google search will bring up.

Annnnyhooo. I decided to link to the source instead. So click this link and lets talk about lava: http://english.cctv.com/20091130/103250.shtml. The link has 6 pages of photos, with 2 photos a page. So I’ll be talking about them like that.

Page number:

  1. This page didn’t inspire me.
  2. The first photo, with volcanic lightning excited me. I want to add volcanic lightning to my models. Seriously. That’s like two of the most badass natural events bound into one tight little package. Volcanic lightning. If you aren’t tittering yet, go look at the photo. But ahhh…I think I’d probably fail >.<. Any ideas on how I could incorporate this?
  3. This page has no pictures of lava on it…which is entirely useless to me.
  4. The first photo has a little bit of what I’m looking for. Notice that it’s a completely dark photo – grey, dark blue, smoke, rock, black. With strong highlights of this eye-piercing orange. Although this isn’t ideal for the Temple Guard, it’s getting close. It’s a little bright still.
  5. Here’s the money shot. First photo, magic-mud lava (I’m sure the scientists have a better name for it :P). Dark, black red in the center, with a slightly brighter dark red on the edges. This is how the TG should be done. Downside: the scales on these guys are tiny, edging will be a pain >.<
  6. Just a mountain here. Lame.

11 photos, 3 ones that have anything to do with my project, 1 that is probably “the one”. Success!

Photography

Photography?

Posted on May 30, 2010

I have an ok camera. At least, it was ok 4-5 years ago when I first got it. It has a 12x zoom, aperture priority, shutter priority, manual focus, up to 1600ISO, up to 2200x2something resolution. Everything I barely knew how to use at the time. At the time, everyone was jealous of me, and I thought I was the king of the camera-related world.

Now…the world has moved onto DSLR and I have a point’n’shoot with a big pointy zoom on it.

Since I’m planning on taking a bunch of pictures of models for this blog, I looked a bit into improving the quality of the photos I’m taking. A couple easy pieces of advice came out – lots of light, get a tripod, make sure you use a white background so the model stands out, use the highest aperture you can – great ideas, and very shortly I’m going to implement all of them, so that anyone reading this no longer has to look at the state of my painting desk when I take a photo :).

One piece of advice stood out though – buy a macro lens. Which, given the nature of my camera, would require me to purchase a DSLR with interchangeable lens.

You can purchase a DSLR for about $500 these days, which is about $4-600 cheaper (for the cheapest) than last time I looked at them. But do I really want a $500 DSLR? Am I buying crap? I’m not the kind of person who likes to buy crap, I tend to look at the “middle of the road” when it comes to purchases of this nature. But then you’re looking at $800+, and then getting more batteries and the right lenses and then you’ve spent $1000 on it.

I spent $1000 last month on buying a new engine part or two for my motorscooter. I use that 3-4 times a week. Before I started taking pictures for this blog, I used my camera twice a year, somes less. In the last few days I’ve pulled it out every day to take a picture of something on my desk (you just haven’t seen them all yet…).

So I think, for right now, I’m going to leave it at the less expensive pieces of advice. But maybe…if I end up with a couple hundred in gift cards for my birthday (coming up in a week and a half), maybe I’ll look a little more seriously.