Macro Explorations

Macro photography is something fun to show off the world we may not see normally. Macro photography can be quite fun thanks to the extra contrast and detail provided by a camera. Some challenges are getting the subject lit and in-focus however.

Flash

One fun part of macro-photography is the lighting necessary. Below are shots with dramatic (high-contrast) off-camera flash using my Nikon SB-800 and a $9 Flashpoint Honey Comb for Speedlight. I really like this DIY walk-through of how a honey-comb modifier works.

This image is me playing around with my Tameron 150mm-600mm G2 lens with my Kenko Teleplus Pro300 1.4x teleconverter. So though not a true macro lens, this 850mm effective length image shows the plant at quite detailed magnification; though I was standing about 20' away for the minimum focus-distance!

Conversely this 50mm image is shot straight with a non-macro Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G lens. Not nearly as magnified even at my minimum focus-distance.

These shots are using my 105mm f/2.8D AF Micro Nikkor lens. Notice how sharp the in-focus areas are but even at f/7 to f/11 there is not enough depth-of-field for the whole fruit/onion to be in-focus.

Here a green filter (usually for color matching fluorescent lights) is used on the off-camera flash to add more drama to the onion.

Focus Stacking

When doing macro work, one's depth-of-field rapidly becomes too small to fit a whole object into the frame. One way to achieve a quality image is take multiple images with the focus shifting through the entire depth of the series of images. Then, since the framing will change as focus is shifted, one aligns the images to "stack" them. Stacking by masking off any out-of-focus areas in a single image composited of the series. The final image should show a consistently magnified image, all in-focus.

Here, I used Hugin to align the images. Then, I used Enblend enfuse to "fuse" the aligned images together automatically. However, as can be seen, my images did not include all areas in-focus. Left out-of-focus, in an unnatural way was an awkward, irregular area on the comforter on the left.

This image was me re-taking the series to ensure focus for all areas, however, there were too many images for enfuse and the severe duplication of in-focus areas failed to produce a good image; as such, I used GIMP to manually mask off areas and stack the images. I was a bit lazy on masking in places but I am now confident I can use the technique going forward.

Example showing how shallow the depth-of-field is for a single image. Notice the blue and yellow fabrics and the woven fabric's limited focus, specifically.