Sunday, March 29, 2009

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Holy Macro


I am still working on macro techniques. This image of a fly with its tongue out was quite involved in the making but the end result was worth it. I used Nikon D3 with 24-70mm 2.8 lens racked out to 70mm and focus set to infinity. I added a 36 mm and 12 mm extension tubes and used the raynox 250 on the end of the barrel. This combination gave me a pretty good image but I still needed to crop to get the image I wanted. The full frame sensor of the D3 can withstand considerable cropping before the image starts breaking down. I used one flash off camera attached to a homemade bracket with an old Gary Fong lightshere for diffusion. I had strong window light from behind the fly to give it dimension. The fly is distracted with honey to keep him in the same spot until I could get some shots off. Click on image to enlarge. Oh yes, one last thing. I used a focus stacking image program, CombineZM to stack 3 images to get more depth of field.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Nathan Muth is now One!








My grandson Nathan came over for a couple of pictures. He is now one years old and cute as a button. He didn't get enough nap that day but I did manage to get a couple keepers. Including one of his clowning around at the front window. His parents promised to bring him back for more pictures on Sunday. The top three images were done in studio with four strobes. Nikon D3.


Monday, March 2, 2009

Ring Flash testing


Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, or in this case two ibuprofen. This image is a not cropped shot of two tablets of ibuprofen. I used a CD disc for the reflection. Nikon D3. Lighting is a nice wrap around effect from a ring flash.