Friday 21 December 2007

macro with 105mm f/2.8 vr (the journey)

macro is a totally new adventure for me. the 105mm lens is very heavy, causing mf with hand-holding at 1:1 very difficult to achieve. the woe is getting worse when we need to stop down for greater dof, which means a very slow shutter speed at indoor lighting condition. mounted the sb600, the setup becomes even heavier so it is almost unmanageable without supporting the arm.

finally settled with a tripod, instead of hand-held at 10s exposure, coupled with manual-firing of off-camera flash, diffused through a napkin from the top position (of the 1st photo). the rest of the photos were all taken with mounted flash using i-ttl mode. an off camera ttl-cord would be ideal in terms of macro photography.

few challenges of macro photography:
  1. extremely thin dof and placement of it at 1:1
  2. tough lighting condition
  3. hand-held manual focusing
after playing with my flash for a while, felt that the lacking of fv lock is very crucial, especially when dealing with event photography. a lot more ps job are required to achieve consistent exposure without fv lock. maybe it is time to explore manual flash metholodgy.

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