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. But what if there are still a lot of debris left on the subject after cleaning? This happens very often and it is very common. I have personally encountered this kind of situation many times and initially I simply “thr
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 enough resolution. When I received this lens, my first impression was that it is small compared to my Canon EF 50 f/1.4 lens. It feels very plastic but very solid and it impressed me with that industrial look, particularly i
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 tube lens for infinite microscope objective! From my last blog post, I mentioned a pretty good article about microscope objectives, Understanding Microscopes and Objectives by Edmund Optics. From there, we know that an in
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 cuts the light significantly, making it really hard to see through the view finder and focus. This is particularly hard for higher magnification macro lenses such as Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8, Laowa 60mm f/2.8 2x and lenses on
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 present you an extreme example of what would happen if you do NOT diffuse your light! What happens if you do not diffuse light in extreme macro photography? Now it seems everybody know the importance of diffusion and, admi
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 software often fills the final image with some arbitrary (arbitrarily chosen) pixels. However, if a telecentric optical instrument is used, due to the nature of telecentricity, there is no change in magnification, therefore th
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 important. Mitutoyo QV 2.5x 0.14, a 5x 0.15 “APO”, and a generic 4x PLAN objective. When choosing a microscope objective, very often you would encounter three common types of objective for their ability of correcting chromatic a
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 parallel with the objective’s front element, then moving camera back and forth to pre-focus it. Believe me, all of these sound easy to over come, but they are really not. After building the setup discussed here, it is a lot
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 drops from above This might sounds very expensive to do, but in actuality, it is not and it is safe, too. The basic idea of this Shoot From Below technique is to use compressed air or pressurized tank to push liquid out of
