Macro Help (With Sample)

[Overread20]

The flash problem that you describe of a very dark background is certianly a common effect of using flash photography. Simply put with the settings your at in natural light you would only get a black/dark shot since there not enough ambient lighting. The flash gives you a big boost to local lighting, but its light falls off very quickly - so by the time it has reached the background elements its lost a lot of its power - ergo why you still get those darker background elements.

Its something that many photographers have tried to deal with with a range of methods - most common is having a flash dedicated to lighting the background elements (usually on some sort of arm setup so that it will light the background without adding light to the main subject) though if your remaining handheld and mobile its a harder thing to pull off (since you have a limited weight and setup time).

A tripod = sleepy bug and no wind early in the morning will let you move away from that and have a nice longer exposure so that your not having a darker background (or youcan use a flash setup and have time to set it up)

 

[Tee_bird]

Maybe you should try not shooting wide open. Lenses normally perform a little better when they are stopped down a bit. So instead of using 2.8 aperture try shooting at 4.5 or something...

They were shot about f/10.

4.5 is even a pain shooting macro. Very, very narrow!

 

[Tee_bird]

Here's some I took today.