Small Stuff

I actually love macro photography. It mostly gets used on flowers. I understand this. Flowers are beautiful. They have great colour. Their shapes are fascinating and a lovely blend of geometry and biology. Somewhere deep in our beings we are either biologically hardwired or spiritually inspired to appreciate them- probably both. I fall victim to the temptation myself sometimes.

There’s way cooler stuff out there to get up close and personal with though. Like creepy insects. My favourite macro lens is actually my Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 USM Macro- an absolutely fantastic piece of glassware which unfortunately, due to its EF-S demarcation, only works with the XXXD range of EOS cameras, and not my EOS 5D. As a result, I don’t have an equitable macro lens for my full-frame camera (now my main workhorse), and so these shots are taken with the macro function on the EF 50mm f/1.8- which works well for depth-of-field effect at the open end, but which has a slow, softer focus and not a fraction of the macro-esque magnificence of the aforementioned 60mm. Hence fewer of this sort of image, and the not-s0-macro closeup goodness that the 60mm has offered on other occasions.

For example, these first three photos (respectively: a Praying Mantis with an M&M, a Dead Ant, and the Zip on my Cargo Pants taken in an airport waiting lounge in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, because, why not?) are all taken with the 60mm. They’re golden oldies in my photo collection now, but I’m very fond of them all the same.

The rest, below, were taken more recently. I’d like to point out that the Florida panhandle has some MASSIVE insects, and I missed some great opportunities, for example a psychadelic cricket darn-well near the length of my forearm, and the infamous ‘cow-killer’ ant- actually a very aggressive species of flightless wasp. However, I did love the colour scheme on this spider we found outside the team house- which I’m fairly sure, if the rest of nature is to be trusted, means that it is toxic enough to kill you just by smelling it.

This second spider, on the same property, I’ve included for sheer creep-out value. I didn’t need a macro lens to capture its grotesquery.

On the more attractive end of the spectrum, this butterfly was gracious enough to SITTHEHELLSTILL for just long enough for me to get this grab- and make me crave for a 200mm telephoto lens so that I could catch these beauties and not keep disturbing them.

This is not macro but macaroon- and isn’t remarkably small, either. It is, however, a nice use of depth-of-field and I didn’t have another post to stick it in. I hope it inspires you to new and greater desserts.

Peace out.

Depth-of-Field Showcase: Lift

Depth-of-Field is a photographic term that references the notional third dimension, or z-axis, of a photographic image.  Of the various pieces of photography relating to the basics- shutter speed and aperture- it’s one of the more elusive for most people to grasp (although everybody appreciates a nice portrait with a blurred-out background).  Effectively, it is the amount of the photograph front-to-back (or, from close to the lens to further away from the lens) that is sharp and in focus.  It is controlled by aperture, which is the diaphragm, or hole, in the lens that allows light to reach the plate, film or sensor.  A wide aperture (small f-stop number, counterintuitively, such as f/1.8) leaves relatively little of the photograph front-to-back in focus, while a narrow aperture (large f-stop number, such as f/22) leaves lots of the photograph in focus.  So a portrait shot at f/3.5 may keep the person who is the subject of the photograph in focus while throwing the background into a nice pleasing blur (known among photographers nowadays as “bokeh”, a Japanese term).  A landscape shot at f/22 may have everything in focus from just in front of the photographer (perhaps 1 metre away) all the way to the horizon.

Aperture of course has to be traded off with shutter-speed.  Each increase in f/stop value (these are marked in half-intervals on your camera as the intervals which change when you choose to manually set your aperture on the “Av” or “Aperture Value” setting, and are universal) halves the amount of light which reaches the sensor, so you need to double your shutter-speed accordingly to keep the photograph correctly exposed.

The other effect aperture has is to increase or decrease the relative sharpness of that portion in focus.  A wide aperture (narrow depth of field) also increases the sharpness of that small portion of the photo in focus.  Conversely, a narrow aperture (large depth of field) such as a landscape with flowers in the foreground and mountains behind, may be in focus all the way from near to far, but the sharpness will be slightly less (although with a landscape you won’t notice the difference).

The final variable that comes in to play is that the actual depth of field is not set in stone, but rather is a function of the focal-length of the camera (that is, the distance from the lens that the central point of focus is)- hence the notation f/x where x is the aperture value.  So if you focus on something 100 metres away, the depth of field before and beyond that point along that z-axis will be much larger than if you focus on something 5 metres away.  In the above shot, the set of weights in my bedroom was about 50cm from my lens, shot at f/2.8.  You can see that roughly 15mm of the shot is in focus front-to-back, and the rest blurs out.  If I used the same focal length but focused on a tree out of my bedroom window 20 metres away, I could expect that a good metre or so either way from my point of focus would remain sharp before falling off.

As I said at the beginning, depth-of-field (DOF) is one of the less obvious applications of the regular photographic variables, but once mastered gives a great versatility and freedom in constructing portraits, landscapes, macro (close-up) and a variety of other photographs as well.

A couple more examples of photos using very shallow depth of field: