I just purchased a Phoenix ring flash, It seems to get great reviews but did I do ok?
The ONLY criteria for whether you did okay is: Does it work for you? If it works to get your subjects lit the way you want, you did okay.
Any info on macro lighting would be awesome and appreciated as well as maybe other macro related items
When I faced the problem of needing more light for my macro photography, I started with the idea that I wanted the MT-24EX (Canon shooter here). After looking around at the (exorbitant, in my opinion) prices and lots of alternate solutions posted on the net, I decided that, for the money, I'd actually rather have 2 speedlights to do the job. That way, I could use them for WAY more than just my macro photography. I already had one, so I just bought another one, and then set myself to building a rig to work with them.
What I came up with is this:
In use, it looks like this:
More images and the whole story behind it are here:
Buck's DIY Macro Flash Bracket For Under $10 Bucks
These days there are 3rd party speedlights, macro lights, ring lights and so forth that are MUCH less expensive than the name brands and, IMHO, they do just as good a job as the name brands.
Plenty of gear snobs will tell you that the name brands are
SO MUCH BETTER, but they can't prove it with actual photo results stacked against those made with the cheaper gear, and they can't pick out from shot to shot which were shot with the name brand vs. those shot with the 3rd party stuff. In the end, they're left talking about "build quality" and "quality control problems", ignoring the fact that the 3rd party stuff is holding up for it's users just as well as the name brand stuff, having been made of essentially the same materials and methods. Add to that the fact that because they're gear snobs who wouldn't be caught dead using anything less than "the best", they haven't actually made real-life comparisons by actually OWNING and USING BOTH. Instead, they base it on selectively filtered stories and reviews they find on the net that confirm their own gear snob bias, while ignoring the overwhelming numbers of positive stories and reviews by everyone else that uses them.
Bottom line: There are
LOTS of ways to tackle this problem of light for macro shooting, and it doesn't have to be expensive. I've seen some
REALLY well done and
VERY inexpensive solutions here on the forum from some
GREAT macro shooters, using little more than a little tape, paper and the popup flash built into their camera.