paint shapes i need some help

[iamsneaky13]

i have my setup all done. it is very similar to linden g's setup, however his shots have something mine are missing(if you don't know him then here Water figures - a set on Flickr). i want to know what you guys think of mine, and what i could do to improve them in terms of flash positioning, magnification, and timing. Also my dof is extremely thin, These were all taken at 1:1 or greater from f16 or f22, i want to know some tips to maximize my dof.
sidenote: i am in the market for a macro lens. i really would love to have one, so if any of you have a used one you are looking to get rid of then just pm me. I have a canon

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thanks guys!

 

[iamsneaky13]

i just emailed linden about it btw. I just hope he gets back to me.

 

[Frequency]

Third and fifth are excellent and sharp; others appear a bit oof or lacks DOF;second is also fine

Regards

 

[Overread]

linden's a friendly chap so unless he's very busy chances are you should get a reply to your question from him. Myself I'll chime in now and say that even though the depth of field is razor thin try to open the aperture up a little bit more. Granted this gives you less depth of field to work with, but (with a 1.6crop camera) at f13 you tend to hit the diffraction limit - f16 sometimes works and sometimes is too soft and at f22 you are well into the area where you'll get diffraction softening your shots. (add about 1 stop to all those values for a fullframe (35mm) camera).

This effect increases as you increase the magnification because a higher magnification (through almost all methods I'm aware off) also results in the actual aperture of the lens reducing. So even though the camera might say f13 the actual aperture might be far smaller - and thus diffraction is more of a concern.

That should help from an aperture based perspective on increasing sharpness. The other option (and you might be doing this already, but I can't tell you settings for these shots) is to shift to having the lighting dominated by flash light and shooting in a dark room. The idea here is that you take a shot that, without flash, would give a totally black result (ie totally underexposed) and then you use one burst of flashlight to light the subject - the flashlight being so fast that it acts like using a super fast shutter speed and only delivers light for that split second - and because the ambient light is not strong enough to give any exposure - only that split second of flashlit action is recorded.
Speedlite flashes will do this well whilst studio strobe lights will do it better (they are capable of releasing more light faster than a speedlite flash can).

 

[iamsneaky13]

overread- thanks for the help! Yeah linden emailed me back, and he was really helpfull. Anyways, i am doing it all in a darkroom only triggering the flash. I know that diffraction is an issue with apertures this small; i have seen this with my macro shots. That is one issue that i need to work out. The softness may also be due to the fact that i am using an ancient 50mm lens reversed.
Another issue i am having is flash positioning. I only have one flash right now, and it makes some harsh shadows in the paint shapes. I am thinking of reflecting my flashes light off of a mirror or something else reflective to brighten the shadows.

 

[Overread]

I've never used mirrors to reflect flash light; I'd be a little worried that a mirror might reflect the light harshly - in the past with macro I've had good luck using simple white paper to bounce the light around a subject.
From there you could also try coloured papers as well.