Rics Macro shots

[juniormc8704]

A beautiful piece i picked up yesterday, very intense colors.

and a piece of chalice i hope turns into something spectacular.

 

[Jeff]

Great pics What kind of camera?

 

[juniormc8704]

Nikon D80 w/Tamron 90mm Macro Lens

 

[Ludwigia73]

That first ric is so bright, it knocked the hermit right over!

 

["Umm fish?"]

Very nice photos!

Can I offer a quick suggestion? Depth of field sucks with macro photos of corals, but if you get the mouths in sharp focus, it can fool the eye and the rest of the depth of field problems will often be ignored. It's like eyes on animals with eyes. If they are in focus then you're golden. Unless, of course, there's some feature that you are trying to emphasize for some reason. In that case, you gotta do what you gotta do.

But, the colors are gorgeous and the photos are nice and sharp. Please post more!

 

[juniormc8704]

oh yeah, i dont remember what f-stop i was on, but i was shooting at ISO 100, and i didnt have my remote shutter release on me, but i know i wasnt over 22, maybe 32, but i can pump it up to 51, but again, it was a quick shot.

More pics to come.

 

["Umm fish?"]

Well, like I say, I really like your shots. I don't ever take it off ISO 100, either, because the graininess bugs the heck out of me, even at 200.

 

[juniormc8704]

exactly, ill expose it for 10 seconds if i have too, lol, heres one at 20 or 30 seconds of exposure under moon lights.

20 secs

30sec

 

["Umm fish?"]

Nice! I get too much movement whenever I go above 20 sec. on anything (even stationary non-living things).

Have you tried playing around with any fluorescence gear, like the Nightsea stuff? Fun stuff.

My wife got me one of the dual-head macro flashes last Christmas and I really have to say, that's been one of the best things for my macro photography. It makes it so much easier when I can set it for f16 or f32 and _still_ go for 1/125th or 1/250th sec. shutter speed, letting me do more handheld shots. The camera tells me it's going to be underexposed, but then the camera will force the flash to do what it can to try to comply with what I'm asking it to do and, surprisingly, it usually works. So, it's fast enough to freeze motion such that I don't have to turn off the pumps and has a small enough aperture so that I get good depth-of-field. I just figured this out a few weeks ago and we're in the middle of a re-model, so my tanks are torn down. But, my LFS let me come in and play and the shots turned out pretty well, all handheld.

The photos are here, if you are interested:

http://65.102.221.68/AquaImports/Aqua_Imports_Web.html

The only problem is that some corals don't look good under the light from the flash, but those that do look great.

 

[juniormc8704]

those pics were great. Also, I don't think the color of the flash hurts the look of the coral. I agree its not a 14 Pheonix look or anything, but the trade off by eliminating the shadows gives some very cool detail.

Its not always easy to do because of canopies and such, but I love using a bounce board and my sb-800, gives a cool lighting effect.

 

["Umm fish?"]

Well, you didn't see some of the acro shots. Some of the gorgeous colors are sure artifacts of the lighting. That doesn't make them less beautiful, just hard to photograph.

The bounce board sounds cool. How do you set it up? Bouncing light down from above? Or bouncing from the side of the tank?

 

[juniormc8704]

shooting through the front of the glass with a external or hot shoe mounted flash at a 45 degree angle. Then you use the bounce board at whatever angle you need to reflect the light directly over the top of the subject being shot. You can even use a white piece of foam board as the bounce board. It allows you to control the angle of overhead lighting, and makes it much softer rather than a bight beam of light like a standard flash shot.

they are used mostly for portraits. You can use a gold foil bounce board and make the flesh tones more bronze in color, like a nice subtle tan. Also hides facial blemishes rather than emphasize them.

if you have a canopy, its not really worth the effort. You would have to remove it to get the right shot.

the cool thing about it is you CAN hit the subject (coral) with bright overhead light, and behind it can be completely dark. Its an easy way to get that nice black background to a subject that may have a lot going on behind it. So rather than just lowering the f-stop to make it blurry, you can just make it disappear altogether.

 

["Umm fish?"]

Gotcha. I haven't yet delved into that world, though I'm sure I will eventually as I'm starting to really enjoy outdoor macro photography and I've started to realize that it'd be nice to relieve some of the shadows sometimes. At least on weekends when it gets above freezing.