Macro shots of products with a Fisheye lens

I’ve been thinking for a while about doing some macro stuff with the fisheye, and today I finally gave it a try. I have a Nikkor 10.fmm f2.8 fisheye lens that I really love. I don’t use it as much as I would because it the pictures tend to get tiring, but every once in a while it comes handy when doing some fishing portraits or landscapes.

This is quite an interesting result.

Not many people know that this lens can focus at a distance of…. I don’t know exactly but basically, you can rub the lens against the subject, as I proved once again today. You can then imagine how special of a macro lens can be. Everything is dramatically distorted; distance between foreground and background absolutely exaggerated, and quite some problems not get in between the light and what you are shooting

Still something that at least will make you smile

Well, if I can be let's say at 2cm from the subject, and have a softbox on top of me or slightly facing towards me, I will have to do some magic trick not to have the shadow of the camera, or my head, covering half of my product. Another issue is how to trigger the flash with the CLS. If I’m under the softbox, it is quite difficult that the sparkle of the pop up on my Nikon can be seen by the SB800 remote unit that is covered by the softbox itself. I leant it today the hard way.

Here we are getting worst, nothing really interesting about it

To find a solution I had to pull the good old’ remote cable and trigger the flash with that one, while putting the other flash in slave. Too bad my chord is so short that the softbox, most of the times, was falling on top of myself and the product. 

Anyway, when I started shooting the lure I had the confirmation that another of my fear was being confirmed. The background, for as wide and tall as it could be, was not enough to cover the 180º vision of the lens. Fortunately is not big deal because the light was quite dim and at 1/200sec and f9 everything turned almost dark (and I had room to further darken it in Lightroom).

Help me say: UGLY!

So I had my happy shooting with the 10.5mm Fisheye, and the results can be seen here, some fun even interesting, some plain awful. I will give it a try again in the future, but I have to work a bit on some details, especially lighting, which can be tricky. For these shots I had my two SB800 through a Lastolite Softbox III on camera left, and an Orbis Ring Flash on camera right

Macro Photography, a .... sparkling idea from Bryan Peterson

That is, a sparkling idea, and is easy to understand why. Check this video from Bryan Peterson, who's books really opened up my mind as a photographer, and see what you can do with some very basic stuff.

Tokina AF100mm f2.8 AT-X Pro D Macro

Today I had a bit of fun with my new macro lens, the Tokina 100 f2.8 AT-X Pro D. It feels good in your hands, sturdy and with a professional finish, I like the lens hood too, looks pretty cool when mounted, I left it on all the time.

The lens is a joy to use, the autofocus system is ok, a tad slow but I mostly shot in manual while doing the extreme close ups. As usual, wide open is quite difficult to find the right focusing spot, especially if you are a dork like me and don’t use the tripod, but his is truly not an issue, is normal.

As far as Photozone concerns, probably among the most qualified sources on the internet for camera lens reviews, the resolution is excellent from wide open up to f11, it is ok at f16 and goes down dramatically due to diffraction at very small apertures. Today I used it between f2.8 and f14, and the out of focus area you get at f2.8 is very nice, in fact I’m very much looking forward to use this lens for my next portrait session.

Here’s few images of today’s session: being able to stay as close as 30cm from the subject with an effective 150mm lens can deliver pretty impressive close ups, you will tell me if you like the result

Orbisflash for macro work

I’m slowly getting familiar with the Orbisflash and this time I gave it a try with a macro subject. Working with the 60mm Micro Nikkor stuck at a mere 10cm from the lure, I did some fun testing

For works of this kind there is no other option but to place the camera on a tripod. Otherwise we would have the Orbis on the left hand and the camera in the other with both hands shaking and major focusing problems. Still, a sharp focus with a macro lens so close to the subject is extremely complicated. If you pay attention, even at f16 the depth of field is so limited that the metallic paint is not as focused as the eye, and I think the difference in depth between the two certainly cannot be spotted without a magnifying glass.

The Orbisflash, as many ring flash used in fashion photography, it gets reflected in a very unique way in the subject’s pupil. It is true that in the human eye is quite pleasing, very cool I’d say, I wanted to see if it would work as well on a plastic one, and to be very honest I believe it does. From the first to the second picture you can see we have slightly moved the Orbisflash from the lens axis to an off-camera position, and the reflection moved as well.

The light that provides such peculiar flash will sure have critics and devotee; I personally find it very cool. It wraps the subject in a very uniform shadowless way, yet not flat or dull, and delivers enough contrast to the image.

When I received it from the shop I thought it was a darn bulky monster, but now, after very little use I handle it with the same ease I handle my SB800 alone, and I am finding many and different applications for it.