This article discusses using slow shutter speeds with handheld focus stacking (HHFS), and shares some new macro snake images captured with shutter speeds from 1/20 to 1/4 of a second.
Yesterday I visited a special frog display at the Royal Botanical Gardens… which also happened to have a trio of water snakes in one of the exhibits. The event gave me the opportunity to get some practice time in doing handheld in-camera macro focus stacking. Continue reading Slow Shutter HHFS
This article discusses handheld macro photography and why I prefer using my Olympus E-M1X and M.Zuiko 60 mm macro lens over the full frame gear I owned in the past.
As regular readers know, I very much dislike using a tripod and only do so when it’s absolutely necessary. In the past when I tried to create handheld macro images with my full frame equipment I would very seldom get any useable images. I simply could not hold my full frame equipment steady enough. It was an exercise in frustration. My full frame gear always seemed to get in the way of my creativity.
As photographers we understand that completing the vision involves doing some work with our images in post processing. Each of us has our own skill level and approach when it comes to post processing, as well as our preferred software programs. We have a very specific vision in our minds for how we want our finished photograph to appear and often capture an image as an interim step towards that vision.
As photographers it can be instructive to go back through some old files and attempt some do overs in post processing. A lot has changed over the past number of years with more software programs using AI (artificial intelligence) technologies. Sometimes these advancements in software can make a significant difference, especially with images captured with small sensor cameras. Do overs can be very beneficial.
It is interesting to consider camera product compatibility and differentiation, as sometimes these factors can work at cross purposes. There are photographers who feel that OMDS should make its proprietary computational photography technologies compatible with lenses from other manufacturers. And, that OMDS should expand the compatibility of these technologies further down its own product line to include less expensive lenses.
Some other photographers are upset that Canon appears to be ready to bar third party lens manufacturers from using its new camera mount and suing them if they attempt to reverse engineer the design. Some folks wonder if this could eventually lead to third party lens manufacturers disappearing down the road.
It can be an enjoyable creative experiment to produce a series of images in keeping with a theme like Emerging From Darkness. Using a mirrorless camera system for this type of creative execution is ideal since we can see how our images will look in real time without any guesswork. Obviously this is important when purposely underexposing images.
Sometimes when we’re out with our cameras the world around us doesn’t cooperate, and only offers us slim pickings in terms of subject matter. Such was the case last Saturday. It was a very quiet morning for bird photography at Hendrie Valley. So… I left early and headed off to the Royal Botanical Gardens. Rather than being greeted by a plethora of flower image opportunities… slim pickings awaited me.
Fully appreciating camera technology is something that we sometimes forget to do as we take our camera gear for granted on occasion. I visited the Royal Botanical Gardens yesterday for about an hour and 45 minutes. During that short time I successfully captured 127 handheld in-camera focus stacked macro images of various flowers and foliage. I did miss 7 attempts.
This article discusses macro style choices as they apply to some specific photographs recently created at the Floral Showhouse in Niagara Falls. Our photographic style begins with how each of us see the world around us. What attracts our eye. What intrigues us. Where we find visual meaning in our experience of life. Then we make decisions on how to bring the images that we see in our minds to life through our photography.
This article, Focus Stacking at RBG, shares a selection of handheld focus stacked macro images captured yesterday at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington Ontario. I used the in-camera focus stacking function in my E-M1X to create all of the photographs in this article. All images displayed are out-of-camera jpegs that were tweaked a bit in post.
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