Never work with children, animals or kiwi fruit!

Visiting Paisley Camera Club on the 30th of January,

Well, not everything or indeed anything really went to plan! As one person said to me at the end it was more a demonstration of someone keeping their cool than of photo technique. Hmm... anyway the aim of my talk was to show how simple and really interesting macro photography can be, and I hope this did come across. I did say I would give more information and here it is.

Stage One get close:

If you need to get closer there are some things you could buy/try other than an expensive macro lens (£300-400):

Getting close, firstly see how well your camera will get without any specialist equipment. To do this set your lens to:

• It's longest focal length setting - it's biggest focal length
• Set your lens's focus to it's closest focus point (make it stick out)

Now the important bit - move your whole camera towards a subject to bring it into focus, don't touch you lens focus or zoom.



CLOSE UP FILTER
A close up filter: cost depends on the size of the front of your lens, it screws on like a filter. They come in values +1, +2 just like the reading glasses from ASDA the higher the number the more magnification and the closer you get, with slightly more distortion at the edges.


An example for a canon(!):

Pros: Cheap, quite effective

Cons: Not great quality, especially in the edges, however pretty good
Cheap trick - use a 'sherlock holmes' type magnifying glass in front of the lens




REVERSING RING

It allows you to put any of your lenses on back to front to allow very close focusing.


An example for a Canon:


Pros: Brilliant quality - gets you in very close, very cheap- £20 on the web or lower

Cons: Hard to get and some cameras need to have set to allow the shutter to open without the lens in the standard position.


EXTENSION TUBES OR BELLOWS

These are extra fitments that space between the camera body and a traditional lens.

An example for a Canon:

Pros: Great quality can be cheap (ish) solid and reliable

Cons: Can darken the image making it hard to see.




To be continued .... Part Two Macro lighting and metering problems explored. (this will only be published if there is interest in this week's info - so please add comments to the articles!)



P.S What went wrong........ I did a Quincy type investigation:

1. The battery in my Nikon D200 was too low to send the wireless signal (I did have a spare if I had known)
   
2. The Nikon D90 must be set to accept Non CPU lenses to allow it to work with the manual lens and ext tube I had.
3. The Nikon D90 is newer than my laptop's software (Lightroom 1& CS3), so it doesn't understand the D90 RAW file
   

Many thanks to new member Ian for his help with the D90.

We did get some pictures!!!