Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Macro photography is fun and it opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities. Naturally, the same goes for macro photos of wildlife such as snakes, frogs, spiders, and other tiny creatures roaming the earth.
If you’d like to start photographing the wildlife up close, especially in remote locations, there are a few things to keep in mind. And in this video from B&H, photographer Colby Brown shares with you five tips to help you get started.
It seems like there is never a week without some sort of reference in the news to the global climate emergency. In fact, just this week we are seeing reports of much higher than usual temperatures at both the poles. As photographers and filmmakers we are often in the unique position to be documenting the effects of climate change and have the potential to draw closer attention to the issue.
That is exactly what inspired photographer and filmmaker Christopher Dormoy to create this hauntingly beautiful timelapse film “Eternal Spring”.
There are macro images, and then there are extreme macro images. Photographer Marco Retana from Costa Rica specialises in macro images of insects that are indeed pretty extreme in the close-up department.
Retana manages to capture such incredible detail, particularly in the eyes of his subjects that DIYP had to catch up with him and find out how he shoots these images.
Close Up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY) shared its last year’s winners in late 2021. And while we wait for the 2022 winners – there’s the “Two of a Kind” challenge to bring us more fantastic photos. It’s a themed contest that runs outside the annual CUPOTY competition, and this time it’s all about tandems.
The photographer who won the 2021 Buglife Bug Photographer of the Year Award has been vilified on social media for his apparently unethical methods to keep the insects from moving while he photographs them.
Autumn is a magical time of year and a great opportunity to get outside and go looking for those amazing organisms called fungi. This video by Tom Mackie shows you how to take advantage of the fall and create some awesome macro shots of toadstools and mushrooms.
Macro is a whole lot of fun, especially if you have a macro rail that lets you rack the camera to shoot a bunch of photos at different focal planes that you can stack together in post. We’ve covered macro rails on DIYP before, like this one from NiSi and they are extremely handy. Spinning that handle by hand, though, can be a slow and inaccurate process.
Well, the DIY Fast Stacker 2.0 from Sergey Mashchenko solves these issues by automating the entire process using stepper motors and a fancy controller. We featured the first version of Sergey’s Fast Stacker here on DIYP, but the new update is much more accurate and offers a much-improved user interface.
Macro is always a popular photography subject. Even if it’s not something you shoot all the time, it’s something that pretty much all of us will have a go at given the chance. But macro lenses are expensive, so it’s not something that a lot of people will try, even if they want to. There are less expensive options out there, though, especially if you own a 3D printer.
We’ve featured photographer Nick Sherlock and his 3D printed extension tubes and macro accessories before, but this pair of extension tubes is particularly interesting. They’re variable extension tubes with ranges of 0-35mm and 50-150mm, designed to let you adjust their length to whatever you need using Canon EF mount lenses on Sony E mount bodies.
The trend in camera flashes over the last few years has generally been to make them more powerful, yet more portable at the same time. Well, bucking this trend, Godox has gone the opposite way, producing a flash that’s on the lower end of the output scale, with the new Godox MF12 Macro Flash. It’s very reminiscent of Nikon’s R1C1 “Wireless Close-up Speedlight System” but at a much lower cost.
Technically, the MF12 is just the individual flash units – like the Nikon SB-R200 is to the R1C1 – and like the Nikon kit, you can attach several of them to a ring that fits around your lens, allowing you to place the light just where you need it. And they’re all controlled from the Godox trigger sitting on top of your hotshoe.
Macro can be a tricky subject, especially if you want to be able to do it well. Chances are, most of us who’ve tried to have a go at macro have made some or all of mistakes at some point. Some of us spot them as soon as we’ve made them and figure out how to work around them. But those mistakes are not always so obvious.
I’ve certainly made a few macro mistakes over the years, where images haven’t turned out exactly the way I wanted, but wasn’t sure why. In this video, macro photographer Micael Widell shows us the eight most common beginner mistakes he sees in macro photography and how you can avoid them.
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