Small Landscapes

MACRO SETUP

Another perfect day for the Small Landscape. 

 First see the set up above:

Canon EOS M with Live LCD Viewfinder, essential for accurate composition

Fotasy EOS M lens FD and camera adapters

Canon FD 50mm lens

Fotasy Extension tubes 50mm
Macro Slide rail for fine focus
Tripod

LED light Bank. Additional light from french doors and overhead daylight balanced fluorescent ceiling lamp

ISO set at 100 aperture for the top image 1.8, others estimated 2.8-3.5, Tv 1/40-1/30 sec, AWB

Shot in RAW and edited with Canon Digital Photo Professional

My goal as stated in an earlier post is to focus on a key element of the flower and let the rest go soft with a wife f stop.  Composition, design, abstractness are more important to me for this imagery than sharpness and detail from front to back.

Once you have a DSLR, the rest of the set up is quite inexpensive. Old Nikon, Canon 50mm lenses are really cheap on Ebay.  Plain extension tubes and Fotasy adapters are about 15-25 dollars!

So what do you think? Critique always welcome.

Enjoy, Jeff

Winter Berries

Winter Berries

This was shot today with the EOS M set up, using a 50mm Canon FD lens with A Fotasy FD to EOS   adapter, a Fotodiox extension tube set at 21, ISO 200, F11, and Tv of 1/40 sec.  AWB worked fine.  Here, I reduced the amount of extension to 21 from 49 to allow taking in a larger scene.  I also stopped down the lens in contrast to the Macro abstract flower colors below to show more detail.  RAW was used and lightly edited in Canon DigitalProfessional.  I really like the EOS M for this and landscape work.  The large LCD and touch screen controls make it a very good photo tool.  Enjoy, Jeff

Macro Colors

 This was a fun project!  My goal was to create macro images that were based more on color, design, and  composition rather that exacting detail.  To do this I used a Canon FD manual lens set at 1.8, mounted on a 3 set of Fotodiox Extension tubes equalling 49mm.  This was mounted on my Canon EOS M.  The camera was mounted on a Macro slide focusing device, then on a tripod.  Focus was first achieved with the lens and then fine tuned with the Macro Slide.  DOF is extremely narrow when the lens is this close to the subject ( about an inch) ISO was 800 and shutter at  1/50 sec using soft window light as the primary light source.  Because the tubes cause 3-4 stops of light loss, seeing the image brightly enough on the live view viewfinder required a shutter speed of .5 seconds for set up.  Once I was happy with what I saw, I set the shutter speed to 1/50 to capture the image.

There are many ways to create macro images: extension tubes, macro lenses, close up filters and reversing a lens with an adapter.  The most expensive would be a good prime macro, the least a set of these non-coupled aluminum tubes or the lens reversal ring. This is a great rainy day project!

Enjoy, Jeff