Macro information - Nikon

[JHemdal]

All,

I ran into a something that I really don't understand. I needed to take a series of extreme close-ups of some lefacutter ants for work. So last week, I did a photo shoot using my D300, a ring flash and a 60mm Nikon micro lens. I was shooting f22 at 1/250. I got some "o.k." shots, but the DOF was like 1/32 of an inch. My editor said the shots were unusable.

I brought my camera back in for a re-shoot, but discovered that I didn't pack the ring flash adapter for the 60mm micro. Not wanting to delay the shot, I decided to use my 50mm 1.8 with a 10+ diopter filter mount lens because they would fit on the ring flash without needing the missing adapter. I was shooting at f22 and 1/250 again. I figured the results would be awful - but almost every shot turned out. Rather than deleting 19 of every 20 shots, I only deleted about half of them. Primarily, it was the DOF that was much better.

Any idea why this would this be?


Jay

 

[JHemdal]

Here is one of the final images. I realize that some of the highlights are blown out, but that is a function of the ant's shiny exoskeleton combined with the ring flash. Look at the DOF though - in the images with the 60mm, the thorax and abdomen would have been out of focus...what maddens me about this image is tht if I had shifted the camera just a half inch to the right, I could have gotten both antenna in the shot.

Jay