Advice given to me by gatekeeper
Originally Posted by jomantha
Any more general advice would be greatly appreciated
Most of my photos are macros/close-ups. For insects, spiders etc I mainly use a Raynox 150, which is less powerful than the Raynox 250. I do occasionally use the Raynox 250 for very small things. For flowers etc I mainly use a Canon 500D close-up lens. This is less powerful than the Raynox 150.
I use a (small sensor, low IQ) Canon SX10is bridge camera rather than a dSLR, but I suspect there are common issues with using a macro/close-up lens on a dSLR.
I believe there is no one "right way" of doing macro/close-ups - what works for one person may not work for someone else. For example, most people don't use autofocus for macros. I pretty much always use autofocus.
I had to experiment with different approaches to find what works for me, and I'm still experimenting.
With all photos there is a "triangle" of factors that needs to be balanced - aperture, shutter speed and ISO - and the balancing can be particularly tricky for macros.
To get deep DOF you need a small aperture (large f number). But if you decrease the aperture too much the image will lose sharpness because of diffraction. This loss of sharpness may or may not be important (long story). FWIW I almost always use the smallest available aperture on my camera, and at that aperture diffraction is definitely decreasing sharpness significantly. However, I find the DOF trade-off is worth it, for my purposes. Your mileage may vary of course. (It does depend somewhat on what post processing you do, and how large you want to view/print an image.)
Decreasing the aperture also cuts down the amount of light getting to the sensor and can make it difficult to get a fast enough shutter speed to get sharp results. Increasing the ISO may help, but you will lose sharpness/detail as you increase ISO. This will be less of a problem for you than for me - with my small (noisy) sensor I keep to ISO 100 wherever possible, and rarely go above ISO 200. Again, this depends somewhat on your post processing.
This may leave two options - use long shutter speeds or use flash.
I much prefer to use available light. This means I often have to use slow shutter speeds. (e.g. 1/8 sec or slower). This summer I have found that getting up at 4am and taking photos in the early morning helps with this, as the air tends to be more still in the early morning. I have taken to paying close attention to the Met Office's forecasts, which includes wind speed predictions, so as to choose which days to venture out early.
Slow shutter speeds need the camera to be still, so I use a tripod - a complicated, heavy thing with an adjustable arm. I use it two ways - either "hands-off", when the air is really still, with the camera's self-timer, or "hands-on", when the air is not completely still, when I take bursts of shots in the hope of getting one which is tolerably sharp.
I rarely use flash as the main light source, but I do use fill-flash on bright days. Insects etc often have some highly reflective surfaces, so if you use flash you may find it helpful to buy or make something to diffuse or reflect flash light, especially if you use flash as the main light source. This is less of a problem with flowers etc.
One key issue (IMO) with add-on lenses, especially the more powerful ones like the Raynox 250, is the distance to the subject. You can only get a really sharp image when the distance (within quite a narrow band for the 250) is right. You may find this is around 4 inches (between the subject and the front of the Raynox lens) for the Raynox 250. It is further (and there is more latitude) for the less powerful add-on lenses that I usually use. However, if you have your camera focused at infinity and move the camera back and forth to find good focus then you may automatically get the right distance. It is a bit more complicated to get optimally sharp results if using autofocus (I can go into this a bit if you like).
I like to be in complete control of where the plane of best focus falls. I try to pick something to focus on that is somewhere "in the middle" of the (front to back) range of where I want the best focus to fall. With an insect for example this may well be its "neck". I try to arrange it so that all of the subject nearest to the camera is in focus, so it is the legs etc on the far side which are not in focus. To make best use of the available DOF I often try to orient the camera so it is somewhat side-on to the subject rather than head-on. This is a matter of taste though. I like to get as much of the subject in focus as I can. Many people doing macros prefer to get in much closer and reveal great detail for a part of the subject, such as a fly's eye or a spider's eyes and mouthparts.
FWIW I like the last image best. It is a matter of taste, but again FWIW I could be inclined to lift the shadows to reveal more of the nice detail currently lost in the dark areas on the wings.
Like I suspect many (most?) people who do a lot of macro/close-up work, I have a very high failure rate. More so perhaps in my case because of my preference for working with available light. I usually capture 500-1,500 images in a day's session(s), and it takes ages to sort through them to find the few that more or less worked out. And even those don't come out of the camera in a usable form - PP is essential. This is especially true for me because I use a camera with a small, low IQ sensor, but even for dSLRs I suspect a bit of PP may often make quite a difference.
Hope some of this is of some use.
exif would be a great help to give a more precise critique
