Marvellous Macro page 5

Mike McNamee returns to his roots in microscopy

Macro Lighting

Lighting

Your lighting choice depends upon the subject. The shallow depth of field demands small apertures, which, in turn, requires lots of light and/or slow shutter speeds. If your subject is inanimate then almost any lighting will suffice and you have time to construct quite elaborate lighting set ups using tiny mirrors, reflectors, spotlights and fibre optics. For fieldwork, flash reigns supreme as it can provide an excess of light at the close working distances and the only decision to be made is that of light modifier. Here again the amount of light available is such that the modifier can be relatively inefficient and the gun will still allow you to use f16 or f22 even at your D-SLR lowest ISO setting. The choice of manual flash setting or automatic is a personal one. Manual has the advantage that it is not influenced by the background, which could be a significant distance away, in terms of the inverse square law, even if it looks quite close. For similar reasons using a set white balance (ie ‘flash’) is preferred to ‘automatic’ which will be heavily influenced by the subject’s surroundings.

the most even lighting, especially of reflective subjects, the DeVille domes are in a league of their own, nothing comes even close to the same lighting quality and absence of distracting reflections, (see www.bobrigby.com). For more occasional use, lampshades, tissue-paper tents and even eggshells have been pressed into service. For slightly largerscale work we have even gone as far as skinning a child’s play house with diffusing plastic, to act as a light tent.

Painting with Light

For magnifications around 4:1 and apertures of f32, even the humble flashgun struggles to provide enough power. For inanimate subjects you can set up in a light tent, dim the room lighting and then use multiple flashes with the shutter locked open on the ‘bulb setting’. You can easily bias the lighting-strength around the light tent to add modelling to your image (eg an extra couple of flashes on one side or the other). This is gloriously simple with digital, especially as you can even drive the camera from the computer and see your results within seconds. In film days we used to take whole rolls of film and then process onsite to check we had the shot in the bag before moving onto the next specimen – it seems truly archaic today but that was the way it was!

Page 1 - Page 2- Page 3 -Page 4 - Page 5 - Page 6 - Page 7 - Page 8

Photo Quote: Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. - Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1898-1991