Insects at Weston Big Wood

GardenersHelper

GardenersHelper

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Nick
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I went to this wood looking for springtails. Here are some insects I encountered. There are more images of some of these, especially the barkflies (if that is what they are) in this set at Flickr. (The crane fly, if that is what it is, at #2 and #3, was tiny compared to crane flies I have previously seen.)

These were captured using my Panasonic G3 with 45-175mm lens, with Raynox MSN-202 for the last five and probably the Raynox 150 or 250 for the first three. The flash with diffuser was in the camera hot shoe.


0621 05 2014-11-18 P1850973 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 15 2014-11-18 P1860042 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 17 2014-11-18 P1860048 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 22 2014-11-18 P1860130 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 35 2014-11-18 P1860212 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 36 2014-11-18 P1860220 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 40 2014-11-18 P1860275 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0621 41 2014-11-18 P1860277 LR by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
Tintin124 said:
http://www.brc.ac.uk/schemes/barkfly/gallery.aspx for ID'S

If you don't already use it .

Great set as per the other 2.
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Thanks Bryn. Great link. I suppose I should slow down and look and learn more about my subjects, but the photographic side of it seems to take up all my enthusiasm. I've bought books for ID etc but hardly looked at them. I should seek a better balance perhaps. (Although I don't really do balance - serially obsessional is more like it. :) :(. I've got a new computer game coming today. Maybe I'll switch to that for a while. )
 
Great set Nick, with some good composition and colours.(y)

George.
 
I come across and take lots of pictures of the Barkflies. Even when i take as much care as possible with the focus, when i look at them on my computer the focus is nearly always slightly off almost every single time. They are not an easy subject for me.
Great set, the quality of lighting on the woodland first three is nice.
 
Great set Nick focus looks spot on not easy in small subjects
 
Thanks George, @Top Cat, Pete.

T0p cat said:
I come across and take lots of pictures of the Barkflies. Even when i take as much care as possible with the focus, when i look at them on my computer the focus is nearly always slightly off almost every single time. They are not an easy subject for me.
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I certainly don't find them easy. I wonder, how are you doing the focusing? Using manual focus or autofocus? If manual focus, are you using the focus wheel or do you leave the focus fixed and move the camera back and forwards until the subject comes into view? Are you cropping the images much? What sort of apertures are you using? Are you using natural light or flash?

I can't remember if I used autofocus or manual focus for these, but it was probably manual focus. I take quite a lot of shots of each subject (if they stick around long enough), and then choose the best one when I review them on my PC. The great majority of them have the focus slightly too near or too far away. Sometimes I don't have any where the focus looks acceptable to me.
 
I have never even tried auto focus since taking macro shots. I just use the moving in and out technique. The problem i have is because the bark flies are so small i dont have enough detail coming through the view finder to be accurate enough. I think i have nailed it but the computer proves me liar. I have a new lens with more magnification now and have been trying it out today and yesterday, and i have got 95% of the focus spot on. This is because the subject is much bigger in my view finder now. I still haven't taken a decent shot of these barkflies yet though, but thats for other reasons than focus.
 
T0p cat said:
I have never even tried auto focus since taking macro shots. I just use the moving in and out technique. The problem i have is because the bark flies are so small i dont have enough detail coming through the view finder to be accurate enough. I think i have nailed it but the computer proves me liar. I have a new lens with more magnification now and have been trying it out today and yesterday, and i have got 95% of the focus spot on. This is because the subject is much bigger in my view finder now. I still haven't taken a decent shot of these barkflies yet though, but thats for other reasons than focus.
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95% sounds very, very good. Hopefully you'll get a good proportion with barkflies too.

As to autofocus, how useful (or otherwise!) it is depends on the equipment you are using. For example, I found it too slow to be useful with the Canon 100L macro lens I had briefly, and of course the Canon MPE-65 doesn't do autofocus anyway. But with the less expensive equipment I'm using I find autofocus useful for many subjects, especially if they aren't too far beyond 1:1 in APS-C terms. I find that autofocus can respond faster and more accurately than I can much of the time, and it lets me be sure of exactly where I'm placing the centre of focus. This is mainly for invertebrates. For flowers I often find manual focus better. The difference is that with invertebrates I often know a position on the subject that, if focused on, will give good dof coverage. This is often on the back, just behind the head. Flowers are more complicated in their shapes and I find it better to use the focus ring to explore where the focus moves as the centre of focus is drawn back and forth.

I don't know what aperture you typically use, but for each two stops reduction in aperture, for example from f/5.6 to f/11, you double the dof. This gives you more latitude about exactly where the centre of focus falls. Similarly, if you use less magnification and crop you will get more dof, and more latitude about exactly where the centre of focus is placed. I use small apertures (the smallest available with a particular camera/lens) almost all the time, and for small subjects, like barkflies, I also "crop for dof".
 
I read with interest all of your posts as you go into detail on why your opinion has been formed. I have just moved to the MP-E65 and have literally only been trying 4x and 5x mag but have not noticed any reduction in depth of field at all whether this is due to me being able to focus more accurately because of the larger subject i am not sure. I consider myself to be very much at beginner level with Macro. I typically use f10 or f11 and a very low ISO as before this lens small subjects like barkflies had to be heavily cropped. I read a blog somewhere about trying to get the flash as close to the subject as possible to reduce the length of the flash therefore increasing sharpness. This has worked for me so for the reasons above i don't use the smaller apertures like you.
As for the 95% focus i need to explain this is my first days with up to 5x mag and i am only shooting, resting the camera on something close and only shooting subjects that are looking to get photographed ( behaving nicely ). I know that 95% successs rate will turn into a 95% fail rate if i pick the camera up :eggface: .
 
T0p cat said:
I read with interest all of your posts as you go into detail on why your opinion has been formed. I have just moved to the MP-E65 and have literally only been trying 4x and 5x mag but have not noticed any reduction in depth of field at all whether this is due to me being able to focus more accurately because of the larger subject i am not sure.
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The aperture you set on the lens is called the "nominal aperture". Let's suppose you are using f/11. There is also something known as the "effective aperture", and dof is determined by the effective aperture, not the nominal aperture.

The formula to work out effective aperture is

effective aperture = nominal aperture * (1 + magnification)

So, if you are using 4x magnification with f/11, the effective aperture is f / 11 * (1 + 4) = f/55.

With an effective aperture that small you lose a lot of sharpness from diffraction. I believe it is common for people using the MPE-65 to use fairly large nominal apertures. For example, if you were to set the aperture on your MPE-65 to f/4 and used full, 5x magnification, then the effective aperture would be f / 4 * (1+5) = f/24, which might be as small an effective aperture as you might want to use.

If they notice this, hopefully other MPE-65 users (@TimmyG perhaps?) will contribute their experience and knowledge here, and also correct any errors I may have made. (I'm not deeply familiar with the workings of effective aperture because I use achromats, for which the effective aperture appears to be the same as the nominal aperture, so when I set a one of my cameras to f/22, that is the aperture which determines the amount of dof and the amount of detail loss from diffraction.)


T0p cat said:
I typically use f10 or f11 and a very low ISO as before this lens small subjects like barkflies had to be heavily cropped. I read a blog somewhere about trying to get the flash as close to the subject as possible to reduce the length of the flash therefore increasing sharpness.
Click to expand...

Here too, others who know more about this than me can correct me, but I think the reason for getting the flash near is to make the source of illumination as large as possible in relation to the size of the subject, so as to reduce "hot spot" reflections of the flash. It is true that the nearer the flash is to the subject the less flash power will be used, and that will speed up the recycle time so you can capture images faster. As far as I'm aware, the length of the flash burst (in normal circumstances) doesn't effect the sharpness of the image.

T0p cat said:
As for the 95% focus i need to explain this is my first days with up to 5x mag and i am only shooting, resting the camera on something close and only shooting subjects that are looking to get photographed ( behaving nicely ). I know that 95% successs rate will turn into a 95% fail rate if i pick the camera up :eggface: .
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Ah, ok. Now I understand. :)
 
Thank you Nick for your help and explanations. :ty:

GardenersHelper said:
Here too, others who know more about this than me can correct me, but I think the reason for getting the flash near is to make the source of illumination as large as possible in relation to the size of the subject, so as to reduce "hot spot" reflections of the flash. It is true that the nearer the flash is to the subject the less flash power will be used, and that will speed up the recycle time so you can capture images faster.
As far as I'm aware, the length of the flash burst (in normal circumstances) doesn't effect the sharpness of the image.

.
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I believe it does in the sense, when using flash it effectively becomes the shutter speed and just like shutter speed if you shorten the duration you get sharper shots. When i first took shots with my flash unit in the hotshoe with a simple cover diffuser i could not get any compound detail in the eyes of flies. As soon as i made a pringles tube diffuser and lay the flash horizontal parallel to my lens my shots became instantly sharper ( when i managed to focus :p )
 
GardenersHelper said:
If they notice this, hopefully other MPE-65 users (@TimmyG perhaps?) will contribute their experience and knowledge here, and also correct any errors I may have made. (I'm not deeply familiar with the workings of effective aperture because I use achromats, for which the effective aperture appears to be the same as the nominal aperture, so when I set a one of my cameras to f/22, that is the aperture which determines the amount of dof and the amount of detail loss from diffraction.)
Click to expand...

To be honest I'm not really sure. DoF certainly seems to get smaller as you increase the magnification, but maybe it's the size of the subject getting bigger (and therefore less of it in focus) and the DoF is actually staying constant. Guess I'll need to get a ruler out...

As for aperture settings, I tend to stick to the guidance Brian Valentine set out a number of years ago in one of his forum posts I stumbled across (it may take me some time to find it again).

Basically at 1:1 I will stick to around ~F13 (nominal), and this is OK down up to around 3:1. At this point I will usually be thinking of opening up to about F9-10, to let more light in, but also get a level of detail I am happy with. At 5:1 I'm usually down to around F8, but will try to go wider if I have a compliant subject and am attempting a stack.

These aren't fixed though, if I feel I want greater DoF for a lively subject I will push it up a bit. Of course, now I tend to use a 1.4X extender I should probably re-evaluate these, but I haven't given it sufficient time..
 
Tim is Brian valentine AKA LordV if so i have read the same as you have posted above by him and i used them today. One thing i have found at higher magnification is the lighting and scene is more stable, maybe its just the TTL working properly but i have not had to adjust the setting much today like i would at 1x-2x my histogram stayed quite similar in completely different settings.
 
T0p cat said:
I believe it does in the sense, when using flash it effectively becomes the shutter speed and just like shutter speed if you shorten the duration you get sharper shots.
Click to expand...

Ah, I should have phrased it differently! My thinking was that if you are using flash (other than HSS/FP flash) then the flash burst will be so short that it doesn't matter what its exact duration is. Or put another way, past a certain point I don't think you get any perceptible increase in sharpness by decreasing the exposure duration. I think the flash burst (any flash burst other than HSS/FP) will be in that zone.
 
T0p cat said:
Tim is Brian valentine AKA LordV if so i have read the same as you have posted above by him and i used them today. One thing i have found at higher magnification is the lighting and scene is more stable, maybe its just the TTL working properly but i have not had to adjust the setting much today like i would at 1x-2x my histogram stayed quite similar in completely different settings.
Click to expand...
Indeed he is. I was fortunate enough to find many of his tutorials in various posts around the internet when I first started reading about macro and learnt so much!

I think I find that with the lighting too. i doubt it's anything to do with the sensor behaving differently to expose the scene; rather the scene itself is so small that light seems to hit it evenly/consistently. That's just a hunch though so don't quote me on that...
 
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