Innovation & Beyond

Why is your insect subject so clean? This question comes up very often when I post a stacked image on Facebook or Flickr. The reason for this question is probably due to the fact that most insect subjects are “dirty” – pollen, dusts, or other little things that are part of insects’ life, so it is hard to get “clean” look when they are photographed. So how do I get them to have a clean look? The first thing is to clean the subject using some techniques described in other posts

Though my first extreme macro lens is not this EL-Nikkor 50 f/2.8N enlarger lens, it is the second one after searching through the internet and various macro related forums. I totally bought the idea that enlarger lenses are designed to project a small negative film onto a larger photo paper with enough resolution and flatness. Image Stacked With EL-Nikkor 50 f/2.8N By reversing it, it makes a perfect sense to project a (relatively small) subject on to a flat sensor with enou

Overview Many people started out macro photography with close up add-on lenses, some are cheap and some are not so cheap. One set of well known and widely used add-on lenses are Raynox DC-150 and DC-250. These close up add-on lenses are very convenient to use, simply screw/clip it onto a (usually) telephoto (zoom) lens. The results can be stunning as evidenced by many beautiful images shot with them. There is another use for these Raynox close up lenses: they can be used as t

When taking pictures using a macro lens, shallow depth of field usually mandates a rather small aperture to gain sharpness. With automatic lenses, stopping down is not a problem because the camera keeps the aperture wide open during view finding, unless you press the depth of field preview button. Only when camera is taking a picture, does it set the true aperture to whatever you set it to for exposure. However, if you ever used a manual macro lens, stopping down the lens cut

OK, that sounds a bit harsh. Then again, almost every (extreme) macro photographer knows this and tries very hard to put as much diffusion as possible. Just visit any Facebook group about macro photography or any forum, you will find talks of diffusion in abundance, there are all kind of setups to diffuse light, all kind of DIY and professional equipment, there are . . . So, yeah, we get it for sure, now go away! Cool, it is almost everybody gets it, but here I am going to pr

I have been asked many times about why there are streaking patterns around border of final stacked image. Well, the most common cause of these streaking patterns is due to the optical instruments used — the magnification of optical instrument changes when the distance between the subject and sensor changes. When stacking algorithm attempts to align all images, there will be mismatch of subject size. Information in one image just does not exist in another, thus stacking softwa

What is chromatic aberration for an optical system? Well, according to Wiki, it is the failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. You usually see this effect when you have high contrast edges in your image. Well, it happens not just with microscope objectives, you will also see this effect with normal photographic lenses, for example along the edges of a mountain and the sky. But I will focus on this for microscope objectives as it is rather importan

Be honest to you, I have neither owned a microscope, nor have I used one extensively. However a recent quest to shoot some butterfly scales at 50x magnification made me build a nice setup capable of doing 50x work using a cheap digital microscope stand. Before this, I have had hard time shooting butterfly scales at high magnification and I was using horizontal setup. First problem is mounting the butterfly vertically, fiddling with specimen holder so that the butterfly is par

As water drop photography grew popularity, there has been many innovations about making water collide and splash. One such technique is the so called “Shoot From Below” setup. Basically, this technique utilizes pressurized or compressed air to push water jet up and then collide with water drop falling from above, the result can be astonishing. Here is one example of Shoot From Below technique — yellow jets are shot from below with pressurized air tank and collide with red dro