Detailed users guide for taking GREAT macro images

Fantastic thread. You are totally cool for sharing this info with us. My daughter just got a new DSLR so I'm going to have her read and practice! Thanks.

 

Excellent thread! I took the liberty of printing it out. I like to save interesting and informative bits in my log book, and this is a great one!

 

maxalmon,

I am using a D60 with a 18-55 lense that came with it.....can I post higher quality pictures than in the basic mode? I took some pics with the camera settings in normal and large, which were 2.5 MB...., but I had to switch to the basic mode in order to post my pics on 3reef. Can I post better quality?

 

Never got to those ISO settings, looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.

 

Great thread so far, very informative. I just picked up a D60 yesterday and took some practice shots last night. I was struggling with getting the lighting to look right in the final shots. Room lighting was off, all tank lights were on. I too would like to hear more about ISO settings and white balance.

Some more macro images in this thread would be great also.. I'll post some when I finally get everything figured out!

 

for anyone interested that uses a dslr... there is a program called helicon focus that allows you to stack multiple photos of the same image that are partially focused. Then it renders it down to one photo that is fully in focus. So you can just set your tripod up and focus in front of the object you are trying to capture than keep moving the focus back and taking a new photo until you have the entire object focused in a series of multiple images. Then the program lets you input all of the photos and renders it down to one fully focused image. Pretty cool program for macro photography

 

figured id give you all an example of what this program does....

I just shot three photos that are sub par for sake of doing this quickly in order to give you all a visual....

Notice how the image is the same in all three photos but i just moved the focus further back for each consecutive image...

focused the front tip of the acro (kinda hahah)


then the front tip and point furthest back is out of focus while the middle of the acro is in focus...


Finally the point furthest back on the acro is in focus while the front tip and middle section is out of focus....


Ok, so now you take all of those photos and put them into this program and it will take all of the images and render them down to this....


Keep in mind i only used three bad photos... and shot them as jpegs and not raw image files. If you do this with more images and move the focus back for each image in smaller increments then you can get some amazing macros!!

Another tip would be to take the group of images and set the white balance on them as a group in light room. Then import them into this program and render them down. Finally save the rendered image and open it in photoshop to make you final adjustments and you will have some VERY IMPRESSIVE macros!

 

Excellent thread! I am trying some macros with my D300, will post them tomorrow

 

Any updates on this thread? I've been playing around with my D80, some of the info on this thread was very helpful, I'm now into playing around with the shutter speed/ISO setting. I get some good shots by just trying different settings, however not knowing exactly what I'm doing makes it hard to recreate or re-use settings that produced good shots.....I know I need to read more and learn more about the camera, looking for a crash-course if it exist.

 

Map: You have the right idea. It is very good to play with your camera settings. Make sure to keep a record of your settings, if it is all digital this information should be displayed in the image properties. You should also read up on some camera basics. After a while you will get a feel for the camera, and probably be able to guess the settings you want pretty easily. Here is an article.