Shot with my makeshift macro rig, a reverse-mounted 50 mm lens and a can of Pringles attached to my flash for close-up directional lighting. I lazily skipped the focusing rail and paid dearly with lousy focus. So, very shallow depth of field, and you are looking at a few millimeters worth of...
Read MoreThe last few installments of Slingshot to Kruger are brewing, their publication somehow slowed by the many imponderables of life. Despair not, they will happen. In the meantime, in search of easy distraction, I have revamped my macro setup and improved the props. My latest addition is the simplest of them all, the famous Pringles box as a flash re-director. Here is what the rather silly apparatus looks like. Canon 7D and grip, Kinko 1.4x tele-converter, good old Canon EF 100mm f:2.8 macro, reverse-mounted very old...
Read MoreI recently started revisiting the macro universe. The pictures in here are a follow-up. First, I got up very early one morning to go visit some Brooklyn gardens and parks in the stillest air I could summon, but dawn is already quite hot and dew cruelly absent, so my success was mitigated by breeze and dryness. The next shoot was done during a walk through the woods of Staten Island's Wolves Pond Park with a few members of the New York Mycological Society. While everybody crouched and discussed pores, gills, stems...
Read MoreIn 2008 while living in Vancouver, I started playing with macro photography. I could not afford good glass and wasn't sure I was ready for it any way. So I experimented with all kinds of low-cost alternatives, most cumbersome and awkward, in various combinations of camera, tripod, focusing rails, bellows, extensions tubes, rings and reverse mounted lenses. The results, however, were fascinating. Perfect coil - The prehensile tip of a gloriosa lily Macro photography revealed that beyond what our naked eyes can...
Read MoreUp at 4:15 AM this morning again, I headed for Stanley Park long before sunrise - only to find out the wind was blowing 5 or 10 km/h over Lost Lagoon. How ironic! Went I'm not waiting for the wind to pick up in order to fly my paraglider, I'm hoping for it to die down to do some macro photography. I ended up in the rhododendron garden. These pictures are the result of multiple focus-bracketed exposures blended together for a small bit of extra depth of field. Mixed results. I need to work on tripod stability so that...
Read MoreUp at 5:00 AM this morning, I put the Bialetti to good use and then headed out with a warm coffee in hand and a bagful of gear on my back, 2 cameras, the tripod and my new macro focusing rail shivering with excitement. Dawn, like water left running out of a rusty pipe, was finally turning clear. There was, however, no one out yet. Streets were literally empty and even runners and dog slaves were few. I wound my way through the most flowery parts of Stanley Park's outskirts, walking around Lost Lagoon towards Coal...
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