BillTre said:
Sounds nice.
With very close, there are all kinds of new problems, like lighting and shadows.
DennisN said:
My next post will be about the journey into the heart of a bell pepper.
A Journey into a Bell Pepper
Gear: Sony A6000 and a Canon nFD 50mm f/3.5 Macro lens, without and with extension tubes
Extra gear: Tripod, remote control, 2 lamps to help with illumination
Camera settings: ISO 200, f/9.5 (approx. the sharpest f-stop for the lens)
Focusing distances tried: from 55 cm down to 20 cm.
Processing: Some basic processing in Dxo PhotoLab and Photoshop
First I want to say I'm more or less a beginner at macro photography. I've tried some things for fun before with extension rings (e.g. flowers and bees), but during this test I understood that macro photography can be quite different from "normal" photography.
I learned that there are various challenges which I won't go into detail about, other than mentioning that there are focusing challenges because the
depth of field (DOF) can get extremely tiny.
Ok, onto the bell pepper...
1. Here's a tasty bell pepper at a somewhat "normal" focusing distance (55 cm):
2. And still tasty, but also a bit magnified (now at 37 cm):
Well, my objective was not to do close-ups of the surface, but the seed "bundle" inside of it.
So I summoned my inner Jack the Ripper and sliced it in half.
I couldn't balance the slice as it was in the previous photos, so I turned it upside down.
3. The bell pepper slice with the seeds visible (still at 37 cm):
4. Let's go further in... (now at 27 cm):
And a little further... (now at 25 cm):
Now we are close to the minimum focusing distance, which is ca 23 cm.
I can't get closer without using extension tubes (or something similar).
If I go down to e.g. 20 cm the image gets out of focus:
So, time to mount extension tubes between the lens and camera. First we try a 10mm tube.
Lens + 10mm tube (at 22 cm):
(this looks promising, but also note how much of the photo that got unfocused!)
Now let's try the 16mm tube.
Lens + 16mm tube (at 20 cm):
And now, let's join the two tubes to one 26mm tube (10+16).
Lens + 26mm tubes (still at 20 cm):
And while we're at it, why not pull in the big guns? I have yet another tube, a 25mm one.
Let's join the three into a 51 mm tube (10+16+25).
Lens + 51mm tube (at 21 cm):
(Why 21 cm suddenly? Well, I don't know why, but I couldn't focus at 20 cm anymore with this tube combination.)
And this is as close as I could get to the seeds with the gear available.
But since there was so much that was out of focus, I tried focus stacking which is a technique where you take a number photos in which different parts are in focus, and then let a software combine the photos into one photo where hopefully more parts are in focus.
It's pretty easy to automatically do this in Photoshop.
Final focus stacked photo (at 21 cm):
(made of 7 individual photos, including some extra postprocessing in Photoshop, but everything is still not quite in focus, though)
Not a pro macro photo, but still pretty cool, I think. At least it's fun.
For getting a feel of the magnification I measured one of seeds shown in the photo.
The seed diameter was ca 4 mm:
And here's the full gear assembled, quite a little beast measuring 20 cm in length :) :
(from left to right: camera, 16 mm and 10 mm extension tube, FD-NEX lens adapter, 25 mm extension tube, and finally the extended macro lens)
Afterwards the bell pepper found its final destiny inside my stomach. It was very tasty.
