confessions of a macro photographer – dof, cheating & a green silk dress
Things are not always how they seem.. Using the Vivitar 55mm lens talked about in a blog post below, I wanted to take a few shots of some rather pretty flowers. My aim was to have the flowers in focus and the grass behind be completely out of focus, making the flowers really “pop”.
Unfortunately, the position of the flowers in the garden didn’t lend itself to easily making this happen so my only choice was to artificially create that kind of ambience by picking a couple of flowers and taking them into my studio..
By placing my wife’s silk, green ballroom dress into my lightbox as a background, I was able to carefully control the distance between the subject and that background as well as placing the light exactly where I needed it. For all intents and purposes, the final image looks like a flower in focus with a very shallow depth of field back to the grass in the background but as we now know, not a single blade of grass exists in this particular set of images. That blurred background is often referred to as “DOF” or sometimes “bokeh”. Yep, cheating is not exclusive to football!
vintage gems – vivitar 55mm f/2.8 auto-macro (komine)
If you’re new to photography it’s easy to get caught up in buying the “latest and greatest” cameras, lenses and equipment. If you decide to do some research and head onto the various photography or equipment forums, most of the reviews will be of lenses within a given manufacturer’s current line-up. The newer lenses are great but are also very expensive and it won’t take long to blow a £1k budget. There are, however, in most of the main systems (Nikon, Canon, Pentax etc..) legacy lenses that are real gems to use and can be bought for relatively small amounts, simply because few people know about them anymore. Now and again I’m going to try to high-light some of those gems and give you some tips on great lenses for small money. Keep in mind that just because a lens has, say, a Canon mount, that doesn’t prevent it being used on a Nikon body together with a simple and cheap adapter. You may lose the ability of the lens to electronically communicate with the camera’s computer but if you’re comfortable working in manual mode and don’t need auto-focus and auto-everything else, then these lenses will still provide you with exceptional results. One of genres where these kind of lenses can be easily employed is “macro photography”. Why? Well, macro photographers know that you rarely use auto functions when shooting subjects so small and so close. Focus is critical and you’ll want to do that manually so the focus is on exactly the right place and tack sharp. You’ll often be working on a tripod, too, so you won’t need any of the new-fangled “vibration control” and shutter speed and aperture will all be controlled manually! You’ll know how to do all that because you’ll already have attended one of our workshops, right!!? :)
OK, gem number one is a dedicated macro lens and a very good one. The Vivitar 55mm f/2.8 Auto-Macro (Komine) is a cracking lens from the 80s and it’s tack sharp. It can be picked up for around £75 and is sold in various mounts so it’s normally possible to find one that will attach directly to your camera without the need for an adapter. It will still be used completely manually but some of the results with this lens are on a par with the Nikon 60mm Micro series, a lens which in it’s current guise costs over £400! Keep also in mind that just because a lens was designed and marketed as macro lens, doesn’t mean to say it won’t also give stunning results used as a portrait lens! Many of the 105mm Nikon macro lenses are used extensively as portrait lenses and always have been. Don’t been afraid to experiment and see for yourself!
photography workshops – are they worth the money?
This is a question that you’ll have to weigh up if you’re considering investing in a photography workshop so here’s a few things to think about.
Many years ago I frequented an online Leica Photography forum. Leica cameras were and are notoriously expensive and the lenses even more so. A typical kit of camera and 3 lenses covering the basic focal lengths will set you back £10-15k and even on the used market you’ll be right up there.
One of the members of that forum would each week post images for critique. He was one of the members who’d spent nearer £20k on his photography equipment and loved to announce his new purchases to the forum. Unfortunately, he hadn’t a clue how to use his newly acquired equipment and each time he posted an image for critique the forum erupted with a barrage of abuse. His images generally consisted of out of focus shots of his cat in the kitchen and if I’m honest they used to make me giggle. I never quite fathomed whether this was somebody trolling the forum members or whether he literally had no idea how to use his camera. His popularity wasn’t helped when he one day announced he was to publish a book!
Anyways, I digress but you see my point. No matter how much you spend on equipment, if you can’t use it with any degree of competence then you’ve really wasted your money. Even a cheap £150 used lens is of no use if you can’t get the images from it you desire.
To this day I still get professional photographers asking me for help with some of the most fundamental and basic aspects of photography. Whilst they’re at least attempting to address the problem now, I can’t help but look at their huge array of lenses and conclude they’d surely have been far wiser skipping one of those lenses and investing that money into a course or workshop instead.
If you’re going to sell your images their value lie in their quality. What people are effectively paying for is your skill, knowledge and experience, all wrapped up in a beautiful image that clearly demonstrates those attributes. They won’t care whether that image was shot using a Leica M9 or a box Brownie camera and in all honesty, a photographer with skill and experience will probably be able to produce the better image with the Brownie in his hands than the person without knowledge and the Leica M9 in their little mitts.
We generally don’t buy a car without first training and obtaining the prerequisite license and ability to drive it, so why would we spend a similar amount on a state of the art camera kit without first learning how to use that? Whether you’re a rank beginner, keen enthusiast or new professional, when you pick up your camera you want to fundamentally understand what you’re doing and hopefully get better and better as your experience and knowledge progresses. And there’s the key for me: you’ll get better and better as your knowledge and experience progresses, not as your camera kit grows and grows!
new isle of wight photography workshops begin in earnest
Photographers with websites are often inundated with questions regarding the equipment they use and the techniques they employ. Nothing wrong with that, either. As a young photographer I’d often be on the phone to various pros asking them for help and titbits of info I could use to better my images! The problem I had was for the first few years I got some very decent shots but I rarely understood why I’d got them. My shooting was very “hit and miss” and in the days of film “hit and miss” was expensive.. Back then, those of us with enough diligence would have a piece of card from the film box attached the the rear of our cameras. When we took a shot we were supposed to jot down the settings we’d used so we could reference those against the images once the film was developed. However, I was already beginning to get work shooting live up and coming bands on stage in Sweden and in that environment there was neither the time to address the cards nor the light to see what I was writing. So I shot many films, got some great shots and loads of duds and was never quite sure exactly what I’d done. As the digital age dawned things got a tad easier as you could view your work on a computer immediately after shooting but even then, if you’d just taken 500 shots, remembering what you’d done with each one was nigh on impossible.
One day a very pleasant photographer based in Norway invited me to his studio in Oslo to shoot together. He was one of the pioneers of professional digital photography and I jumped at the chance to take my Nikon D1X and lenses over to him and have him explain a few things to me! During that trip and a few subsequent phone calls he very succinctly explained to me to the fundamentals of photography and filled in the blanks that existed in my basic knowledge. It was at that point that my photography began to take off. Now I understood why shots that had worked, worked and instead of having to shoot the same image 50 times to make sure one of them was decent, I could now switch the camera into fully manual mode, dial in the correct aperture and shutter speeds and have a reasonable degree of confidence that the shot I was about to take would be what I intended.
Now, 25 years later, I see so many keen enthusiasts, beginners and even “professionals” who are stuck in very much the same place I was. Their digital SLRs sometimes give them some great results, they just don’t know why and for that reason they cannot produce those results with any consistency.
The Beginners Workshop I’ve just constructed is designed to help aspiring photographers with exactly what the friendly Norwegian photographer helped me with all those years ago and hopefully at the end of the workshop you’ll have a new confidence in your camera and now possess a good understanding of how it works, even in manual mode!
Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting a page which will give an overview of the workshop content, showing you exactly what you should expect to learn during the day. However, all one to one workshops can be tailored to your bespoke needs, so if you’re confident in some areas but weak in others, we can focus (no pun intended) on those weaker areas.
These workshops are not classroom courses but instead informal, practical and theoretical. We’ll go through the fundamentals but most importantly you’ll get to fire back as many questions as you need and together we’ll find out how you learn best. I’m a practical and visual learner so I need to see things in action to fully understand them. Other friends of mine can just read a book and immediately apply those principles in practice and I’ve always been very jealous of them! What I’m going to give you with the Beginners Workshop is very much what I received during my trip to Oslo. A fundamental understanding of what you’re doing and a strong platform of knowledge upon which you can build and grow. Photography is a lot of fun when you know what you’re doing. Up until that point it can be frustrating and difficult. Let’s make it fun together!
For more information on workshops and prices, please click the “workshops” and “payments” tabs above in the main menu or feel free to contact me with any questions.
miniature marvels
One of my personal passions is watch photography, much due to my love of miniature marvels, which watches certainly are.
