Help me With Macro

[William Baroo]

I loaded the A7IV and a Sigma 105mm macro lens on the new tripod and geared head. I decided to see if in-camera focus bracketing was of any value for macro. Looks like it is not. Is that about right? I took three-shot bursts, and they look pretty awful. I guess a rail is in my future.

I am glad I moved up to a mid-level tripod. The cheap ones were not made to hold much. The geared head is also very pleasant to use.

 

[William Baroo]

I'll tell you what. Learning about macro reminds me of what I went through back when I used to go to the gym several times a week. I thought if I did what the big muscleheads swore they did, I would look like them. Then I found out they were all on drugs, and I had no chance unless I took drugs, too. Every last one of them was a shameless liar.

Today I realized nobody is taking really good macro photographs of live bugs in the wild, using full-frame or APS-C, with good DOF, without killing, chilling, or gassing them.

I got myself a Nisi rail, and I started learning to use it. I got some help from AI and found I was going to have to move it 0.3mm at a time when shooting at 2:1. So for a 2 cm bug, almost 70 steps. There is no way anyone on Earth has ever done that successfully unless the bug was dead, asleep, or cold. No live, happy insect is going to sit still for 70 shots. For 1:1, you still have to take three dozen shots.

Am I wrong?

It looks like the rail is only good for things that can be kept very still.

 

[Silversnapper]

I'll tell you what. Learning about macro reminds me of what I went through back when I used to go to the gym several times a week. I thought if I did what the big muscleheads swore they did, I would look like them. Then I found out they were all on drugs, and I had no chance unless I took drugs, too. Every last one of them was a shameless liar.

Today I realized nobody is taking really good macro photographs of live bugs in the wild, using full-frame or APS-C, with good DOF, without killing, chilling, or gassing them.

I got myself a Nisi rail, and I started learning to use it. I got some help from AI and found I was going to have to move it 0.3mm at a time when shooting at 2:1. So for a 2 cm bug, almost 70 steps. There is no way anyone on Earth has ever done that successfully unless the bug was dead, asleep, or cold. No live, happy insect is going to sit still for 70 shots. For 1:1, you still have to take three dozen shots.

Am I wrong?

It looks like the rail is only good for things that can be kept very still.

You are indeed wrong William, for example check out this guy's flickr account Brian Valentine There are many more macro shooters, including me, that are doing just that. It takes time and infinite patience and of course there are lots and lots of failures, but the results are more than worth it. Stick at it man, you'll get there in the end.

You might also like to checkout this site:

Nature Photography -- Macro and Close-up - www.photomacrography.net

 

[petrochemist127 152]

It looks like turning the focus peaking setting down to "mid" improves the focus. Google AI gave me that advice. It said low was most accurate, but on that tiny screen, I can't see the color when it's set to low.

I find the settings for focus peaking depend on the lens I'm using. Some older lenses never show anything unless the peaking is set to it's most tolerant. With sharper lenses the setting that gives minimal indication ensures the focus is optimum.

 

[smoke665]

Am I wrong

As pointed out above yes to a point. It depends on the amount of dof you want to include. Throughout this thread I've questioned the lack of any really sharp focal points. Possible contributing factors could be to close (inside the minimum focus distance) the minimum distance on the 105 ranges from just over 12 inches to as much as 4ft depending on which model it is, motion blur (subject or camera), focus points set to multiple vs spot, and to much reliance on focus peaking.

When shooting macro on tripod, I use live view (back screen) to enlarge 16x on my designated focal point, and adjust focus by eye (I dont use focus peaking). If I'm stacking, I use a focus rail, adjust my focus on the first shot, then use the rail adjustment to move to each step.

 

[William Baroo]

Yesterday I saw a guy saying he took dozens of shots and kept two. Maybe the right course is to accept a huge failure rate.

 

[smoke665]

Yesterday I saw a guy saying he took dozens of shots and kept two. Maybe the right course is to accept a huge failure rate.

Maybe you need to stop worrying about others, start shooting, and taking notes on what works/what doesn't for you.

 

[William Baroo]

I have been shooting, taking notes, and seeing what works for me.

 

[William Baroo]

Well, this is interesting.

It occurred to me that one shot with 70 exposures amounts to around 2 gigs. Are people seriously using that much storage? Their houses must look like data centers.

 

[smoke665]

Well, this is interesting.

It occurred to me that one shot with 70 exposures amounts to around 2 gigs. Are people seriously using that much storage? Their houses must look like data centers.

Duh, I could hold 8,000 of those on my external SSD alone. Between internal, external and online 60,000 plus. Storage is cheap.

 

[wfooshee]

I have 6 TB of storage, and I'm approaching the need to replace it, because of both the capacity and the age of the drives. I keep ALL of my edited images, both the final JPG and the original RAW (so I can go back to an image if I learn something new someday and want to try it) on one drive for each, and another drive stores the backup images of my main drives. That backup drive is only connected during the backups, just in case someone does something stupid somehow. I do not keep RAW images that I culled from editing.

 

[greybeard44 17]

When I shoot closeups (not really macro), I shoot handheld with a Nikon dSLR and a 105mm micro nikkor with a Nikon R1 flash. I use continuous focus to compensate for any slight movement I may make and f/16-22. I shoot at the cameras base iso (usually 100 or 64) and let the flash units operate on auto. This is what I do for most of my stuff. But, if I have the time and want to schlep around a tripod I do a focus stack at f/11 with natural light.

 

[wfooshee]

Keep in mind that a long lens at its close focus limit can do what "looks like" macro photography. Technically it's not actually macro, but you can get really nice results of non-static subjects without having to try to stack images, and it is close-up imagery. This was at 300mm from about 6 feet, and pretty heavily cropped.

 

[Rickbb75 14]

I have 6 TB of storage, and I'm approaching the need to replace it, because of both the capacity and the age of the drives. I keep ALL of my edited images, both the final JPG and the original RAW (so I can go back to an image if I learn something new someday and want to try it) on one drive for each, and another drive stores the backup images of my main drives. That backup drive is only connected during the backups, just in case someone does something stupid somehow. I do not keep RAW images that I culled from editing.

I shudder to think of how many TB I have. Mostly old 500MB and 1TB hard drives I use a SATA/USB adaptor on. Plus several purpose bought external drives. I really need to get back to that often put off archiving/sorting/culling job I started last year. sigh. At least I got all the slides, negs and most of the prints scanned, first pass anyway.

 

[Rickbb75 14]

Well, this is interesting.

It occurred to me that one shot with 70 exposures amounts to around 2 gigs. Are people seriously using that much storage? Their houses must look like data centers.

After you stack them and have what you like for the final image you can delete the intermediaries. But looking around at my stacks of drives, (I can see 19 just from here), I suppose I do have a data center. lol