My Addiction To Macro

November 23, 2010 @ 7:10PM

My Addiction To Macro

Why the super-close world draws me in

By David Schloss

It’s not that unusual for us to get new gear in-house to test or to use for shoots or projects, but since my son has been born I’ve been spending a bit of time focused on some things (pun intended) that have me back in the spending-money phase.

While I’m pretty agnostic about camera gear (I’ll shoot Nikon or Canon or just about any other piece of equipment we have in house) I’ve spent extended periods with both of the major brands. For about five years while I worked at PDN I had loaner Canon hardware and then after that gig that gear went back and I picked up some Nikon test gear.

I have a pretty specific rule about test equipment—anything that might be used for my personal shoots I’ll buy. In other words, if we’re not doing a book on macro photography, I’m not going to ask a camera manufacturer to let us borrow their close-up gear. I’m picking on macro work here because it’s some of my favorite.

Despite the fact that we don’t have a Canon body in-house for testing right now there are a number of pieces of gear that I purchased for the system that are still in my camera drawers. One is my favorite piece of glass of all time the Canon 65mm 1x-5x macro, a superb piece of glass that’s essential a photographic microscope. I’ve used it over the years to shoot some of my favorite personal shots, including these (and others over at davidschlossphoto.com)

Sadly there’s no complementary lens in the Nikon arsenal, which leaves me a bit crestfallen. Yes, I could use step-up rings or a bellows (which I’m totally going to do at some point) but the convenience of the Canon macro lens allowed me to capture things that would just be difficult or impossible with a bellows. The ability to have aperture control over the lens while capturing images is priceless.

Having a newborn son with lots of teeny baby parts I’ve decided to split the difference and pick up the 105mm Micro Nikkor which is a great, great lens. It’s not the same sort of field of view of the 65mm 1x-5x but I’m starting to have a blast with it.

I test most things on my cats before unleashing the technology on the world, and my obliging cats allowed me to grab this

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which is just at the range where the 65mm 1x-5x would start. I could still go quite a bit deeper with that lens. A nice thing about the 105 is that it’s also a really nice portrait lens.

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Of course, having the macro setup meant that I needed to have the Nikon closeup speedlight setup as well. It’s really great, the wireless transmitter does a great job and there are step up rings in the kit designed to couple the flash to just about any light that might be used for macro shooting.

The box features Nikon’s patented “more padding than you thought necessary” system with a giant beautiful leather case cradling the components. Sometimes I think it’s a shame that Nikon’s cases aren’t an integral part of their camera system. It seems a shame to take out the lights and just leave the box in my storage closet.

Since the Speedlight system is compatible with my SB-900s, I can actually trigger a full studio of lights with this setup. This upcoming week I’m going to work on setting up some complex macro lighting with controlled backlighting solutions via the SB-900.

I've been playing around with the lens with both live model and still life—there's always a break-in period with new glass where you're not quite sure what it can do yet. There's a saying about crépes in France that I think of whenever I'm working with new gear—"the first crépe is for the dog." In other words, the first few season the pan and then the rest are cooked perfectly. When you get new glass the first shots are often for the dog.

However, being a macro junkie I'm already enjoying what I'm getting out of the 105mm Nikkor. Here's a shot of a semi-still life, my son Henry.

And here's a combination of a still life shot and the focus stacking technqiues from John Neel's review of Helicon Focus I generated this fine-art reproduction of the inside of a lilly.

I think that these two images capture what I like most about photography—it's possible to switch from hyper-realism to fluid dreamlike fine art from shot to shot. That, as a photographer is how I see, and macro photography really helps me express that.