Macro Macro Macro!

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InternetJunky: May 25, 2002

Tiglath III posted:

Only flies here at the moment, still cold outside.

Fly by Bryan's Photo Pages, on Flickr

This is just plain gorgeous. Well done!

# ? May 21, 2013 22:11

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 00:10

dakana: Aug 28, 2006; So I packed up my Salvador Dali print of two blindfolded dental hygienists trying to make a circle on an Etch-a-Sketch and headed for California.

aragog by nick.kneer, on Flickr

...hey there.

# ? May 22, 2013 02:58

Bob Socko: Feb 20, 2001

Baby spiders are hanging out on my siding. Each one is about the size of a pinhead.

DSC01509 by Kelly_Davis, on Flickr

# ? May 28, 2013 01:09

THRILLED 2B HERE: Jan 14, 2006

Hey guys, just looking for a little advice. I checked in with the IRC guys tonight regarding macro photography with my Sony A300, the consensus ended up being get a Tamron SP 90mm f/2.8 AF Di 1:1 Macro lense as that would be the best newbie friendly option.

The issue that I'm mainly suffering from is chromatic abberation on insect wings/legs etc as well as some minor DoF issues, wings in focus, body not for example. Shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm F4/5.6 DI LD Macro at the moment. Wondering if anybody has experience shooting with Sony cameras or a camera with a comparable spec as the A300 that uses the Tamron 90mm Macro and could chime in just to make sure i'm making the right choice staying with the A300 as a platform and investing in more glass.

THRILLED 2B HERE fucked around with this message at 03:51 on May 28, 2013

# ? May 28, 2013 03:45

Bob Socko: Feb 20, 2001

THRILLED 2B HERE posted:

Hey guys, just looking for a little advice. I checked in with the IRC guys tonight regarding macro photography with my Sony A300, the consensus ended up being get a Tamron SP 90mm f/2.8 AF Di 1:1 Macro lense as that would be the best newbie friendly option.

The issue that I'm mainly suffering from is chromatic abberation on insect wings/legs etc as well as some minor DoF issues, wings in focus, body not for example. Shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm F4/5.6 DI LD Macro at the moment. Wondering if anybody has experience shooting with Sony cameras or a camera with a comparable spec as the A300 that uses the Tamron 90mm Macro and could chime in just to make sure i'm making the right choice staying with the A300 as a platform and investing in more glass.

Well, I shot the spiders with an a99 and a Minolta 100mm f/2.8 macro. The Tamron is a pretty good lens. I've never used it myself, but I've yet to see anyone say they don't like their copy. KEH has one for $225 - link. Another option would be the lens I used, which KEH sells for $364 - link. KEH also has an older version of the Minolta, but I would recommend against it for insects as the focus gearing is slower.

Hit up the Sony thread if you want more info.

# ? May 28, 2013 04:17

seravid: Apr 21, 2010; Let me tell you of the world I used to know

Keep in mind the Tamron has the shortest working distance of the usual 90/100mm macro lenses, while the Minolta/Sony has one of the longest (maybe the longest?). Very useful when shooting live subjects at high magnification.

# ? May 28, 2013 06:01

ugh whatever jeez: Mar 19, 2009; Buglord

THRILLED 2B HERE posted:

The issue that I'm mainly suffering from is chromatic abberation on insect wings/legs etc as well as some minor DoF issues, wings in focus, body not for example. Shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm F4/5.6 DI LD Macro at the moment.

I have used that lens and you will be blown away by how much better actual macro lens is. And don't worry, that DoF will only get shallower :v:

I also only recently picked up Canon's 100mm macro and I hope to get better at macros.

IMG_5023.jpg by ruut103, on Flickr

IMG_4572.jpg by ruut103, on Flickr

IMG_6047.jpg by ruut103, on Flickr

# ? May 28, 2013 08:23

wanghammer: Mar 24, 2001; DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH COCK I HAD TO SUCK TO GET THIS CUSTOM TITLE? A LOT!

I'm new to the whole Macro game.. here are a few random gross things taken from the same branch

IMG_7895 by bighoits, on Flickr

IMG_7942 by bighoits, on Flickr

IMG_7969 by bighoits, on Flickr

# ? May 31, 2013 15:27

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

Finally got some time to play with my 4x microscope objective.

Random honeybee on honeysuckle

Edit: I just bought some ping pong balls to use as diffusers with the microscope objective. I think it made a great improvement over my folded white paper tent in the first shot above.

Edit 2: Last spam from me. Just another shot with this ping pong ball.

Graniteman fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Jun 5, 2013

# ? Jun 2, 2013 21:04

FACKER: Jan 2, 2005

Some invasion pics

DSC_1722 by undefined., on Flickr

DSC_1730 by undefined., on Flickr

DSC_1727 by undefined., on Flickr

DSC_1741 by undefined., on Flickr

# ? Jun 4, 2013 23:10

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Graniteman posted:

Finally got some time to play with my 4x microscope objective.

These are fantastic. I've done some fairly crap stacks with my 10x so far, but I hope to do some good work soon.

# ? Jun 5, 2013 09:59

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

spongepuppy posted:

These are fantastic. I've done some fairly crap stacks with my 10x so far, but I hope to do some good work soon.

Thanks! You do some great work so I appreciate the comment.

What do you do for backgrounds? The black ones are presumably just flash only but you have some nice gradients. I've just used white paper for mine.

# ? Jun 5, 2013 18:54

mAlfunkti0n: May 19, 2004; Fallen Rib

What is the cheapest way to do macro? I see the reverse ring, etc... Currently I have a 50mm 1.8 and Tamron 17-50 2.8, and a 70-200L on the way. Any of these lenses good when reversed?

# ? Jun 5, 2013 19:43

seravid: Apr 21, 2010; Let me tell you of the world I used to know

mAlfunkti0n posted:

What is the cheapest way to do macro? I see the reverse ring, etc... Currently I have a 50mm 1.8 and Tamron 17-50 2.8, and a 70-200L on the way. Any of these lenses good when reversed?

The reversed 50 is a classic for cheap macro.

The 70-200 with some tubes or a close-up lens should work very nicely for larger subjects like dragonflies and butterflies.

# ? Jun 5, 2013 20:19

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

mAlfunkti0n posted:

What is the cheapest way to do macro? I see the reverse ring, etc... Currently I have a 50mm 1.8 and Tamron 17-50 2.8, and a 70-200L on the way. Any of these lenses good when reversed?

The reversed 50 would work well. You can put it on the end of a cheapo bellows to get some ability to change magnification, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Fotodiox-macro-bellows-Canon-Cameras/dp/B003EDTG8W

You can also get an old Nikon film enlarging lens from Ebay (50mm, f/2.8, $20-40) and reverse that on the end of the bellows and you can do some pretty serious high magnification stuff if that's what you are into.

# ? Jun 5, 2013 20:54

Anveo: Mar 23, 2002

Jumping Spider by anveo, on Flickr

Lunch Time by anveo, on Flickr

# ? Jun 5, 2013 21:38

Moon Potato: May 12, 2003

I've been hunting for a "bokina" with pristine optics over the past few months, and finally was able to nab a Tokina version with the extension tube for cheap. The aperture is sluggish, so it's going to need to go into the shop for some work, but I'm looking forward to contributing to this thread instead of just marveling at all the great work you guys post in it.

Does anyone here do any macro video work in the field? If so, what kind of continuous lighting setup do you use? It seems like mounting a Kick LIght or some other LED panel on rod support would be ideal, but I'd love to hear from people who have some experience with it.

In the mean time, here's the obligatory catte lens test.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Jun 6, 2013 01:54

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Graniteman posted:

Thanks! You do some great work so I appreciate the comment.

What do you do for backgrounds? The black ones are presumably just flash only but you have some nice gradients. I've just used white paper for mine.

Random household objects. Fruity coloured paper gift bags are quite good, because they stand up by themselves.

The backgrounds in most of my better stacks on Flickr are the front cover of my copy of Invertebrate Zoology (Fox, Barnes and Ruppert) :eng101:

# ? Jun 6, 2013 09:21

William T. Hornaday: Nov 26, 2007; Don't tap on the fucking glass!
I swear to god I'll cut off your fucking fingers and feed them to the otters for enrichment.

Ladybug by William T Hornaday, on Flickr

# ? Jun 7, 2013 02:27

ugh whatever jeez: Mar 19, 2009; Buglord

Sometimes I really like shallow DoF.

IMG_9009 by ruut103, on Flickr

Some horse-fly, nasty buggers:

IMG_8766.jpg by ruut103, on Flickr

Obligatory jumping spider:

IMG_8918 by ruut103, on Flickr

# ? Jun 7, 2013 21:00

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

spongepuppy posted:

Random household objects. Fruity coloured paper gift bags are quite good, because they stand up by themselves.

The backgrounds in most of my better stacks on Flickr are the front cover of my copy of Invertebrate Zoology (Fox, Barnes and Ruppert) .

I just shot this using my DVD case for "A Bug's Life." I'm not loving the reflected green light but I'll know better next time.

edit: I switched my pro flickr account to the free one and now apparently Lightroom can't replace images. They get deleted and re-uploaded. I hope they bring "replace" to all flickr users because I use that a lot

Graniteman fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Jun 10, 2013

# ? Jun 9, 2013 02:26

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Edit: [Crappy image removed]
2013-06-10-17.58.49 ZS retouched by spongepuppy, on Flickr

Edit: Now with better processing.

Leptomyrmex erythrocephalus by spongepuppy, on Flickr

Dia de Pikachutos fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Jun 10, 2013

# ? Jun 10, 2013 09:26

Rovasti: Aug 20, 2004; Wild boar weights two hundred kilometers and eats boiled potatoes

Great, it's finally summer here, so it means bug hunting with a camera!

H�m�h�kki 28 by Sami Kaukolinna, on Flickr

Jokin by Sami Kaukolinna, on Flickr

Lude by Sami Kaukolinna, on Flickr

H�m�h�kki 31 by Sami Kaukolinna, on Flickr

H�m�h�kki 32 by Sami Kaukolinna, on Flickr

# ? Jun 10, 2013 18:38

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Graniteman posted:

^^^ This is great

# ? Jun 11, 2013 11:14

DoctaFun: Dec 12, 2005; Dammit Francis!

THRILLED 2B HERE posted:

Hey guys, just looking for a little advice. I checked in with the IRC guys tonight regarding macro photography with my Sony A300, the consensus ended up being get a Tamron SP 90mm f/2.8 AF Di 1:1 Macro lense as that would be the best newbie friendly option.

The issue that I'm mainly suffering from is chromatic abberation on insect wings/legs etc as well as some minor DoF issues, wings in focus, body not for example. Shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm F4/5.6 DI LD Macro at the moment. Wondering if anybody has experience shooting with Sony cameras or a camera with a comparable spec as the A300 that uses the Tamron 90mm Macro and could chime in just to make sure i'm making the right choice staying with the A300 as a platform and investing in more glass.

Hey man, I have that tamron lens you speak of for sale in the buy/sell thread, let me know if you are interested!

# ? Jun 11, 2013 16:05

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

spongepuppy posted:

^^^ This is great

Let's talk about post processing for a second. I like how you process your shots and I've never seen a good description of a workflow so I just make it up as I go. Here's what I do for these 2-5x macro / microscope objective shots. My workflow for normal photography is very different than this focus stacking workflow.

Shoot 30-50 shots, typically in JPG. I waffle on jpg vs raw, but these big focus stacks turn into heaps of data in raw. White balance set to flash.
If I shot raw, export all as 16 bit TIFF files.
Load all original jpegs or exported tiffs into Zerene Stacker. Stack using PMAX method. I always get lovely artifacts using DMAP and I don't know why. If I use photoshop align/blend it takes forever and allegedly uses the DMAP method but ends up looking better than Zerene dmap, but worse than Zerene PMAX (usually).
Export from Zerene as 16 bit tiff with the "retain dynamic range" option selected.
Open in photoshop and apply the following Nik filters in this order:
dfine 2 - default option
Viveza 2 - play around, but always increasing structure. Use control points to block the background so that no structure is applied to background (prevents blotches, especially when sharpening)
Color Efex - tonal contrast filter. Really makes details pop. The detail extractor filter also can be nice but I usually don't use it.
Change image resolution in photoshop to 300 dpi (no resampling). This has an effect on the sharpening step that happens next.
Sharpener Pro - output sharpen using default "display" option. Use control points to block any sharpening from applying to the background.
Delete the extra layers from the above process, retaining just the Color Efex layer and the Sharpener layer (so I can resharpen later for a different format).
Convert to 8 bit depth in PS to reduce file size now that I've got all of the tonality finalized.
Import the final tiff to Lightroom where the rest of my images live.

I do all of my regular photography editing in lightroom with almost no filters. But I find that these filters work well for macro and if I am going to go into photoshop eventually I may as well avoid having a bunch of virtual copies and extra tiff files in lightroom.

# ? Jun 11, 2013 18:38

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Most of my stacks are between 70 and 250 images, shot in raw.

I generally use Zerene's PMax method, because it handles complex detail better. The reason for this is the way it works - essentially, it separates everything into component frequencies and then takes the parts with the highest detail at each scale. That's why backgrounds and specular highlights end up funky. If the subject isn't very hairy, I do a second DMap stack, and set the slider to the lowest possible setting, and then basically brush in the margin that way.

If the subject is hairy, then it's much more painful, because you get those crappy artifacts you refer to. I have had some success in using frequency separation to separate the high frequency detail from the low, and then basically paint in a flat background, although it's quite labour intensive.

My workflow is basically the same as yours - the only difference is in the sharpening side of things:

Do shots in RAW+JPEG
Run camera JPEGs through PMax and DMap
Sometimes this is enough - but colours are often wrong. If that's the case, I run them through ACR with everything set to neutral/flat (but usually with a bit of exposure compensation and luminance NR). I use JPEGs, because I can't tell the difference between JPEGs and TIFFs once the stacking has been done.
Run ACR JPEGs through PMax and DMap. I will use Zerene's retouch function to correct any odd transparent regions, often by doing substacks and using the result as a source image.
Load finished PMax and DMap TIFFs into PS, brush in the margins from he DMap image if I can get away with it.
Optional: Do the aforementioned frequency separation and brushing if the DMap image is terrible.
Smash a merged version of the document with Smart Sharpen at ~2px/~130% / mask unsharpened background bits back in.
Maybe throw in a cheeky Surface Blur with Radius 3-5, Threshold 3-5 to get rid of residual grittiness.

Since I'm operating in diffraction territory, Smart Sharpen does a really good job of reconstructing pixel values and building high-frequency contrast. Here is a 100% pixel-for-pixel example of before/after:

ppexample by spongepuppy, on Flickr

# ? Jun 12, 2013 10:32

FACKER: Jan 2, 2005

Here is some sort of bee-fly hybrid I found

DSC_1908 by undefined., on Flickr

# ? Jun 12, 2013 23:26

Graniteman: Nov 16, 2002

spongepuppy posted:

My workflow is basically the same as yours - the only difference is in the sharpening side of things:

Thanks for the walkthrough. I tried it and like your smart sharpen method output better than what I was doing. I think I would still do extra output sharpening before printing etc, but this seems to get the best pixel level sharpness of what I've tried. The surface blur is a nice trick, but it doesn't seem to help on the images I tried. I don't have a sense for how that filter works but I'll look into it the next time I am working on a stack.

# ? Jun 13, 2013 04:28

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Pre-press (over)sharpening really depends on output size and effective image resolution, as well as the actual printing process. I don't tend to print much of my stuff (because I always hate it on some level).

I find that inkjet prints need *heaps* of sharpening, while most non-inkjet digital processes seem to include a certain amount of sharpening at the RIP stage. Lithographic offset print is pretty tolerant of heavy oversharpening provided that the screens aren't that fancy new stochastic-dot type that make everything all gritty.

# ? Jun 13, 2013 12:00

InternetJunky: May 25, 2002

Finally had a chance to try out the 65mm MP-E today:

Butterfly Wings

Water drops on a leaf

Focusing is ridiculous if there's even a tiny breeze. I got lots of shots of fly's asses.

edit: I also guess I really need to clean my sensor

# ? Jun 16, 2013 03:39

VelociBacon: Dec 8, 2009

Thanks for the great information in this thread - I just bought a raynox DCR-250, should arrive in a week or so. From everything I've read it should be great with my Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6.

# ? Jun 16, 2013 21:01

Dr. Despair: Nov 4, 2009; 39 perfect posts with each roll.

I found a 77mm step down ring. You know what that means?

35/3.5 reverse mounted onto a 400mm.

It's basically impossible to use. I had it resting on some books to try and keep it level with my monitor, and it the image would shake wildly when a plane took off a mile away (A big plane, granted, but still). Still, almost 6 pixels across, this could have potential.

# ? Jun 17, 2013 18:08

Platystemon: Feb 13, 2012; BREADS

Mr. Despair posted:

It's basically impossible to use. I had it resting on some books to try and keep it level with my monitor, and it the image would shake wildly when a plane took off a mile away (A big plane, granted, but still). Still, almost 6 pixels across, this could have potential.

That�s what, like 12�? Not bad.

# ? Jun 17, 2013 18:18

Dr. Despair: Nov 4, 2009; 39 perfect posts with each roll.

Platystemon posted:

That�s what, like 12�? Not bad.

I just did a quick calculation (used dot pitch to see how wide my image was, divided by sensor size) and got almost 9x exactly.

The image covers an area about 1.5mm wide.

# ? Jun 17, 2013 18:32

Dr. Despair: Nov 4, 2009; 39 perfect posts with each roll.

Have a tiny tiny orb weaver.

2013-06-17-19.42.21 ZS PMax.jpg by MrDespair, on Flickr

How tiny?

That was stupid and pointless and I should have just waited a month for it to grow up nice and big.

# ? Jun 18, 2013 03:01

Dia de Pikachutos: Nov 8, 2012

Mr. Despair posted:

That was stupid and pointless and I should have just waited a month for it to grow up nice and big.

For those of us with a morbid horror of spiders, smaller is generally preferable.

Edit: you could probably do some pretty amazing stuff with moulds and lichen with a setup like that. Maybe even catch a few tardigrades? My microscope objective setup is worthless for field use, but something like that where you could stop down the front objective could be great (if you can keep it steady).

Dia de Pikachutos fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Jun 18, 2013

# ? Jun 18, 2013 08:23