Testing out my Raynox 250

mjmountain

mjmountain

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First attempts. Taken in my garden with my Sony a77, Minolta 70-300 lens, Raynox 250 and homemade flash diffuser. Handheld, no tripod.

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Dave70D said:
Very nice set of shots, I find the Raynox 150 easier to use than the 250, so you did a good job. Love the Ladybird (y)
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Yeah I take tons of shots, because of the shallow DOF only 1/10 tends to be usable, biggest problem I have is my cheap flash takes ages to warm back up, which can often mean the mini beast in question has hopped off.
 
Well done for first attempts.

If you are using TTL flash you might want to give it some negative flash exposure compensation.

You should be able to get more DoF. What aperture are you using, and how much are you cropping?

How are you focusing? The reason I ask is that there may be an issue with the distance to the subject. With the 250 there isn't a lot of latitude - if you are outside the quite small acceptable range of distance to the subject then you can't get a sharp image. The third and fourth in the first post and the fourth in the second post make me wonder about this.
 
Thanks. I was experimenting a great deal but think I settled on around f20. About 1/3 of the images are cropped.

Focusing by minutely moving in and out on the subject (manual focus) using focus peaking to get an idea of when key areas are in focus.
 
mjmountain said:
Thanks. I was experimenting a great deal but think I settled on around f20. About 1/3 of the images are cropped.
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Interesting. I'm surprised the DoF was so thin with that small an aperture, even for uncropped images. You might want to try filling less of the frame with the subject and cropping more.

mjmountain said:
Focusing by minutely moving in and out on the subject (manual focus) using focus peaking to get an idea of when key areas are in focus.
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Hmm.... That should work fine. Not sure how for example the third one in the first post would have been like it is with that approach. I had thought that nothing was in focus but looking closer I think it may just be very thin DoF.
 
mjmountain said:
Some of them had different apertures, I think I started at f5. Also the red eyed flies were tiny, about 3-4mm, the little thunderbug (black beetle) was about 2mm.
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Ah, ok. It's really difficult with such small subjects. You might want to try making them quite small in the frame and cropping a large amount.
 
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