macro photography
With spring upon us here at Sabi Sabi, the insects are starting to emerge and along with insects come frogs! When it comes to macro photography, one can never run out of subject material - there is always something lurking around to take a photo of, provided one has the correct lens. I found this Foam Nest Frog calling around the lodge, so I decided to quickly take the opportunity to use my 100mm f2.8 macro lens to get a nice close up of the frog.
I set the lens to manual focus which makes it easier to focus on the subject, especially in low light. Slight movement forwards or backwards with the lens can also make the fine adjustments necessary for the focus plane. It is key to use a flash in macro photography, because one usually works with very small apertures and therefore very little light is allowed through the lens. The flash also brings out all the detail in the subject.
I set my camera to manual and my shutter speed to the flash sync speed, which is 200th of a second for my camera body (the flash sync speed will differ from camera to camera). The light from the flash freezes the image, so hand-holding the camera is ideal at these shutter speeds. To increase your depth of field and pick up as much detail as possible, a good aperture for macro is anything from f16 to f32. In this case I set it to f25, had my ISO at 1000 and set my flash to ETTL which exposed everything perfectly.
Stay focused
Darred Joubert
