I originally got a macro (close up) lens mainly to do jewellery/product shots, I didn’t really intend to do much nature photography with it. A while ago whilst doing some late night internet shopping I had a moth buzzing round the lightshade being a nuisance. I turned the light off hoping it would go away but it just landed on the computer monitor instead. I tried (and failed) to get a shot of it using the monitor as a lightsource (it was too dim). I then decided to have a go with the flash not really knowing what to expect. Considering it was all done with no preparation I was pretty pleased with the result. Here’s the set up if you don’t believe me!

The chance to do some more nature macro photography fell into my lap recently - though I warn you if you are at all afraid of spiders then I strongly suggest you don’t click through to the second part of this post!

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This headshot of Oliver, editor of law journal Ebor Lex, done in a standard meeting room in a very short timescale. I thought it would be an interesting subject for a “stream of consciousness” post showing every shot that was taken during set-up and and trying to explain what was going through my head at the time. This is not supposed to be a perfect example of how it should be done, merely a record of how it was done.

It’s important to have some idea what you’re trying to achieve before you start so I decided I wanted something edgy, like this shot but with a more traditional background. That look was achieved by having a pair of softboxes very close to the subject, angled slightly toward the camera so I started off with the lights in that position.

No light meters no modelling lamps, what follows is exactly what I saw on the back of the camera at each stage…

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Photographing live music can be very rewarding but difficult at the same time (as evidenced by the fact I couldn’t condense it to just 10 tips!)

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In November I did a shoot to promote a new student night in York called Tequila. Amonst other things the images were going to be displayed on a large plasma screen in the venue so I wanted them to carry maximum impact so went with a bold white background look. I was uploading a few of these images to flickr and thought I’d write a short post about how I set up the shots.

Zack Arias has a written very good set of tutorials on working with seamless backgrounds in this way. The background is lit separately from the subject to make it easier to get the exposures right and to “blow out” the background (make it show up pure white in the camera). Gobos (go betweens) are used to stop background light hitting the subject:

It is stated that three lights is basically a minimum for this (two for the background, one for the subject) however it’s not an absolute necessity as we shall see…

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What do you do when it’s past midnight on a cold dark Christmas evening & there’s nothing on TV? Put on a 100mm 1:1 macro lens and look for something to point it at! For me the Christmas tree with all of it’s lights and decorations was an obvious target. This is the first time I’d been taking photos for the sheer fun of it in a long time. I was using a macro lens so that nothing would be too close or far away, giving me complete freedom - a principal which dictated my entire approach to the shoot.

If you don’t have a dedicated macro lens there are several options to getting close focus - extension tubes, screw on close up adaptors and finally reversing a telephoto lens.

Other than that you only need a tripod - camera shake is exacerbated by working close to your subject and the relatively dim output of the fairy lights is not going to get you anywhere near hand holding territory! I had the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and this obviously has the effect of reducing depth of field, but the main reason I was shooting wide open, however, was so that I could simply look through the viewfinder and see exactly what I was getting (without having to keep pressing DOF preview). Shoot into something hollow such as a Christmas tree and there will be detail at many of depths, selective focus allows you to pick out what you want and pretty much defines the shot.

I was simply moving the camera around, turning the focus ring and just seeing what looked interesting. The best thing about self assigned projects (or rather, messing around) is that there are no constraints and no penalty if it all goes wrong. It’s something I’m going to force myself to do more often from now on as it not only will it help brush up on technique but it’s good to relax and recharge creativity (you can tell we’re getting to that resolution making time of year again). That’s pretty much it except to say read on to see the results, and do give it a go yourself!

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I’m going to start this with a quick recap for people who might be unsure of what a ring light/flash is or why they should care, those of you who came here for the review may skip straight to the “read the rest…” link at the bottom!

A ring light surrounds the lens and produces images with an intense glowing look and faint ‘halo’ like shadow around the subject. They have been very popular with fashion photographers for a while although opinions on their use tend to differ…

Until recently the only commercially available ring flashes were either the AC powered studio variety or the hotshoe mount macro ring lights. Neither of these are particularly well suited to shooting people on the go - the big lights require an even bigger battery or long extension chord and the macro version simply isn’t powerful enough. Now there is a third alternative in the form of adaptors that take an existing hotshoe flash and turn it into a ring flash through a series of special reflectors inside a ring shaped diffuser.

As an events photographer who strongly dislikes on camera direct flash this option is extremely attractive I preorded the Orbis as soon as shipping was announced. Read on to find out what it’s like to shoot with under real world conditions and more importantly what it does for your images!

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Ok this is the first (and by far the most important) link/piece of advice I can offer for aspiring photographers.

I’ve always hated the look of flash in photos; nuclear white deer in the headlamps subjects in front of an underexposed background. When I started to become serious about photography I did everything I could to make use of available light to take photos including investing in expensive wide aperture lenses and some dicey handheld long exposures. I was totally anti-flash.

I knew that studio photographers used big flash heads all the time but had dismissed this as the preserve of the rich[er than me]. This was until discovering David Hobby’s blog: strobist, which demonstrated what can be accomplished using an inexpensive battery powered flashgun and little bit of brainpower.

This lead me to the following realisation: photography is light. And if you are not doing everything in your power to bend light to your will then you are not realising the full creative potential of a given scene. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a suite of big mains-powered strobes, the key is to control the light by any means possible, whether it’s changing the colour or firing the flash remotely from an oblique angle or simply bouncing/modifying the onboard flash.

MG