A micro-macro world
Discovering the incredible detail in the tiny world all around us by getting even closer than a regular macro lens will allow
There is no need to spend a fortune travelling to the other end of the world to find exotic creatures to photograph. Take a closer look around you and you’ll find an amazing variety of insects on your doorstep, and their beauty and complexity can be revealed with micromacro photography.
For several years I have taken macro shots of insects, but limitations of depth of field, when photographing up close, make it impossible to see too much of the creature, and since beauty lies in the detail, I started to explore high-resolution focus stacking. It may sound difficult and expensive, but there is much you can do at entry level.
All you need is a good macro lens. You’ll need an insect to sit still for long enough for you take series of images, turning the focus ring a tiny increment between each shot. Stack the pictures in Photoshop and – voilà! – you get remarkable depth of field.
Most macro lenses give 1:1 reproduction on the image sensor, but for even more impressive magnification,
I use macro conversion lenses; these clip onto the front of a regular lens to achieve truly microscopic levels of detail.
For more precise control, you can automate the whole process, although admittedly, this does start to become more expensive. I use a Cognisys Stackshot rail system with an electronic controller, which moves the camera in tiny individual steps that can be as small as a single micrometre.
The images – or ‘slices’
– are then assembled in
dedicated software; Zerene Stacker and Helicon are the most popular commercial focus-stacking products. I make pre-stacking corrections to the slices in Lightroom, where the batch functionality is pretty handy. I also spend quite some time in Photoshop to tidy up the stacked picture to get rid of blurs, diffraction and cleaning up lots of dirt.
You need to undertake lots of experimentation to find the way that works for you. Take notes and be systematic in your approach. Sometimes you get surprising results, as revealed in my image of the grasshopper, where it appears as if it uses its antennae to create radio waves.
Some of my macrophotographing friends in the Danish National Society of Nature Photographers have seriously started seeing me as an unscrupulous murderer. The reason is that, the only way to get insects to sit still – sometimes for hours at a time – is to kill them. But I do this humanely; before I put a needle through their body, I pop them in the freezer. From a cynical point of view, I kill far fewer insects than my friends splatter on their car windscreens when going to our meetings.
Some of my macro-photographing friends have seriously started seeing me as an unscrupulous murderer