rl Creative

Hello every­body, it’s been a while since my first post. Hope every­one is doing well and enjoy­ing our blog. With this post I am try­ing to start a series of posts in which I will try to share my expe­ri­ence in macro-photogprahy. There will be dif­fer­ent top­ics, hope­fully one every week.

Please don’t be angry at Roland, as he is a bit busy at the moment, prob­a­bly a lot of uni­ver­sity home­work to do..

As you all have already noticed, today’s post is about tips for tak­ing bet­ter shots…better Macro shots В  I want to begin with com­par­ing var­i­ous cam­eras suit­able for shoot­ing macro photography.

Sorry, that I didn’t men­tion that before, but I’m not going to give you all the tips today, sorry Today I will write only about 1, but I will try to cover as many aspects as it is pos­si­ble and try to explain, what is bet­ter and why. The rest tips will come out in my next arti­cles That’s why this post’s title has a “part 1″ in the end

Ok, what I was going to do? Yep, I was going to com­pare var­i­ous cam­eras, that are suit­able for macro shoot­ing

First of all, we should dis­cuss cam­eras that can be used for macro purpose.

There are three types of cam­eras that can be used for macro shoot­ing. Bud­get com­pact cam­eras, advanced com­pact cam­eras and DSLRs (dig­i­tal Single-Lense-Reflex). My gra­da­tion of cam­eras may be not cor­rect accord­ing to clas­si­cal divi­sion; it is solely based on cam­eras owned by me and my relatives/friends.

As a com­pact bud­get I am con­sid­er­ing cam­eras like Canon IXUS 80, as an advanced com­pact — Canon S5 IS, Canon A80 and as a DSLR – any dSLR will do, for instance Canon 400D.

All these cam­eras usu­ally have inte­grated Macro Mode – which can be handy for aver­age macro shot, but since we are look­ing for per­fect macro with good mag­ni­fi­ca­tion we can­not accept it. Prob­lem is that most of the cam­eras can­not focus on a very short dis­tance from an object. (There is, of course, a SUPER-macro mode on most of the mid-range com­pacts – in which case you lit­er­ally put your object on a front lense ele­ment of the cam­era. Unfor­tu­nately how­ever, in that mode you cant make any adjust­ments to improve your photo – there­fore we will dis­card that oppor­tu­nity for now).

Com­pact budget

Hmm, what was I talk­ing about….oh right – macro mode on cam­eras. So in order to be able to focus closer cam­eras need “­some addi­tional help” – addi­tional close-up lenses that dra­mat­i­cally decrease dis­tance to the object as well as mag­ni­fy­ing the object.

So, If you want to go for really detailed and close-up macro pho­tos, you have to for­get about bud­get com­pact cam­eras. Rea­son is quite sim­ple — con­struc­tion of those cam­eras does not allow any acces­sories to be attached to it, nei­ther macro lenses nor exter­nal flash. That is the main obsta­cle that pushes away a begin­ner from macro pho­tog­ra­phy — the neces­sity of buy­ing some addi­tional lenses to achieve some results.

Advanced com­pact

Now, let’s turn to advanced com­pact cameras.

As seen from the name, those cam­eras have the upper hand com­pared to bud­get cam­eras. Main advan­tage, apart from fully man­ual mode, is the option of apply­ing addi­tional acces­sories, like macro lenses on top of the camera’s lense with help of var­i­ous adapters.

My first cam­era / macro-camera was some­what an advanced com­pact cam­era — Canon Pow­er­shot A80. With addi­tional equip­ment such as an adapter (for adding lenses or fil­ters) and a Soligor +10D macro lense, my good old В A80 served me in my macro ven­tures for almost 5 years. Quite a nifty fea­ture on that cam­era (and at 2003 one of the few cam­eras that had it) was a fully artic­u­lated screen – which allows tak­ing pho­tos at var­i­ous unusual angles, which comes very handy espe­cially in macro photography.

Using A80 it was rel­a­tively easy to shoot macro – with all my equip­ment assem­bled on my cam­era I just had to find an object and sneak to eat qui­etly, and take a shot. And with help of fully artic­u­lated screen, I could take shots from var­i­ous uncom­fort­able angles (from the ground level and way above my head).

p.s. Pho­tos taken with with A80 and Soligor macro lense can be seen at the end of this article.

But those were good old times, with really few good advanced com­pact cam­eras on the mar­ket. Nowa­days, on the other hand there are remark­ably more cam­eras avail­able for us with bet­ter fea­tures of course…. (remark: After I wrote that sen­tence I wanted to pro­vide an mar­ket overview of dif­fer­ent brands that have rotat­ing screen…but as I dis­cov­ered, there are sim­ply no brands, except for Canon, that have this unusu­ally cool fea­ture on advanced com­pact cam­eras – brands like Olym­pus, Sony and Pana­sonic indeed have incor­po­rated it into their lat­est DSLR cam­eras, which I will cover later on…)

There­fore you must con­sider mod­ern cam­eras like Canon S5 IS, Canon SX1 IS and Canon G11. All those cam­eras can be fit­ted with an appro­pri­ate adapter and together with a good macro-lense they are really impres­sive tool for cre­at­ing good macro photos.

DSLR

And now, finally J…DSLR cam­eras. The mar­ket for SLRs always has been quite diverse and huge, with plenty of pos­si­bil­i­ties. As for me, I own a rel­a­tively out-of-date DSLR – Canon 400D, which is quite a good cam­era for its price. For SLR macro-photography good (and pricey) macro lenses are essen­tial. Luck­ily, there is a more bud­get option – addi­tional close-up lenses that will attach on top of any lens. Here on a photo I have my 400D with Kit lense +Zeikos Macro lense for screwed on top of it.

And on next photo I have the same 400D with mounted Tam­ron 70–300 + Raynox macro-lense – this is the com­bi­na­tion I have been using lately for my macro shots. (http://akadime.deviantart.com).

Due to the fact that that is almost all my equip­ment, suit­able for macro needs, I will have to draw a line for now. When I will be able to afford true macro-lenses for SLR, I will share my thoughts and expe­ri­ence with you guys.

Tak­ing macro shots using dSLR cam­eras is con­sid­ered to be more dif­fi­cult than with advanced com­pact cam­eras with rotat­ing screens, since when you are focus­ing with SLR you have to look inside the viewfinder. There­fore, your object has to be basi­cally always at the same plane as your eye. And you can’t take shots from unusual angles, like you can with advanced com­pact cam­eras. Of course, lately, due to the break-through live view tech­nol­ogy on DSLRs, many brands have adopted live view with fully artic­u­lated screens. (Iron­i­cally, most of the brands have it – Nikon, Olym­pus, Sony, Panasonic…but not Canon! Unfor­tu­nately those cam­eras are still quite expen­sive, but as time goes on they will become more affordable).

On my last pic­ture I would like to show how my macro equip­ment looks like when fully assem­bled – Canon 400D + Tam­ron 70–300 lense + Raynox Macro Lense + Flash 430EX (with home-made bouncer).

Photo Com­par­i­son

Pho­tos taken by me with that equip­ment can be seen on my photo-website.

In com­par­i­son some macro-photos taken with my Canon A80 + Soligor Macro Lense:

So for now, bye-bye. And see you soon for my sec­ond post of the series in which I will be dis­cussing var­i­ous tech­ni­cal aspects of tak­ing macro shots with var­i­ous cameras.

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