Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Macro photography
Danbo Walks the Line
Dec 11th
Danbo Walks the Line
I’ve got a bit of a side project at the moment taking photos of these crazy little Japanese toys called Danbo (Japanese for cardboard, I think). They are off a cartoon as far as I can gather and they make great photo subjects. There are quite a few of these types of photos out there on the web so I thought I’d add a couple more. Macrophotography is great for cold, rainy days, as I’ve said before, if the light isn’t great outside or you just can’t really be bothered braving the cold, a cool indoor subject works really well, better than shots of the dog/cat next to the fire anyway. If you have a few flashes and some off camera triggers (either a flash cord, sky ports or pocket wizards) it opens up loads of options and helps you get to grips using small flashes without the stress of having a model, wondering why you keep taking a photo and then scratching your head as you look at the LCD screen. In this shot the Danbo was lit from camera right and the guitar neck was lit from above, I wanted the rest of the room to be dark, as it was a bit messy and I wasn’t in the mood to tidy up! This was taken with a 50mm f1.4 at f/2 ISO100 1/160 with both flashes on about 1/32 power.
Ice Ice Baby
Jan 4th
Taking a break from landscapes I got this on one of my rambles, I liked the abstract quality and the wavey lines in the ice. The pebbles break it up a little and add a focal point but to be honest there wasn’t a huge amount of compositional thought behind this one. A lot of photo mags say it’s a good idea to freeze some leaves in a plastic tub to get some abstract ice shots, I’ve not tried it myself but it seems like a decent rainy day thing if you are into macro photography. As for exif, this was ISO100, f/8,1/25 at 70mm.New Macro Lens
Sep 5th
I recently bought the Sigma 150mm Macro (after reluctantly selling my 50mm version) so I decided to have a few test shots with it. I used a 580EX off camera to let me use a narrower aperture (to increase DOF). 
I didn’t spend too long on these really, I just wanted to get some pictures as it was raining quite hard outside. These were taken at ISO200, f8, 150mm, 1/125 sec, on full manual mode as I was using a flash, the shutter speed was enough to cut out any ambient light.
I didn’t spend too long on these really, I just wanted to get some pictures as it was raining quite hard outside. These were taken at ISO200, f8, 150mm, 1/125 sec, on full manual mode as I was using a flash, the shutter speed was enough to cut out any ambient light.
More War
Jun 14th
Another one from my forthcoming war collection which I’m tinkering with as releasing as limited ed prints (bit pretentious I know). I’m going to do a total of 25 images with a run of 25 on each image. I’ve brought in a few props, in this one we can see the famous Sherman tank bearing down on the Germans. Anyway the partially complete gallery of these shots can be seen here. Take a look if you have a spare few minutes.Marco Soldier Art
Jun 1st
I’m doing a small collection of images using old toy soldiers and this was one from the first batch. Pretty simple set up, one light coming from the left and a small amount reflected off a white board on the right, quite a dramatic result.I used a 50mm macro lense and set the camera to full manual and dialed in ISO200 f/16 1/100sec. I was also using a new border style today, more to try and define it as art rather than Haribo toy product shots!
Adventures in Macro Photography
Apr 9th
A bit of a lazy day photography wise today, I ended up getting back into my macro mode, I used to do quite a lot of macro stuff but haven’t recently, (the same could be said for blog posts!) Anyway there were no fancy lights involved or even tripods used in this shot. It was taken over a sink of water with natural light from the outside causing the refracting in the bubbles to get the colour. The exif is as follows: 1/200 at f5.6 ISO800 with my sigma 50mm macro lens. I decided to stop when I started dipping my camera in the water. As the ISO was a bit higher than I usually like I ran it through noise ninja, a plugin for CS3 which does a good job of removing noise. I’m not sure about the open space at the top but I’m not a huge fan of changing aspect ratios so I left it in. Old Passion Flower
Jan 20th
In an attempt to keep my post rate up I had to scrounge the back catalogue again, this was taken a while back when the passion flowers were in bloom, there’s nothing remarkable about it, I think it just caught my eye as I had processed it in sepia, which I have to stop doing really. Depth of field is very important with macro subjects, this was taken at f/8 as I knew I would be working close but I still wanted the eye to be drawn to the stamens (the male bit of the flower for all you botanists) so I needed a reasonable amount of DOF. I was going to do a bunch of smoke photographs today but I have lost all my incense sticks but I’ll hopefully do some of them soon.Water Macro
Sep 24th
It’s raining far too heavily to take the camera out so here’s one I took earlier off a car bonnet outside, I do have another version of this on my site but with a petal to add some interest to the scene. It was taken on my 50mm Sigma Macro lens at f8 for 1/2 a second I should have used a far higher aperture to make sure all the droplets were in focus. I added a gradient overlay in photo shop with the blend mode set to colour. Flower Macro photography
Sep 6th
Macro photography is where the subject is recorded at actual (or larger) size, and as most sensors (in digital cameras) or film don’t exceed 35mm (corner to corner) the subjects have to be very small. I really enjoy this side of photography as you can get some great results from fairly ordinary subjects and you don’t need to travel to far off locations. Flowers and insects make really good subjects. One aspect of photography it helps to know about in macro photography is depth of field, this is the measure of how much of a subject is in focus, this can vary from miles, as with landscape photography to millimetres, in macro photography. One factor when dealing with depth of field (DOF) is working distance, ie how close the camera is to the subject as the closer you get, the thinner the DOF. To combat this it is often necessary to stop down your aperture (to say f11 or 16), this results in longer shutter speeds as there is less light getting in (remember smaller apertures = smaller hole = bigger f numbers). and therefore a tripod is often used, especially if shooting indoor. A really good DOF simulator can be found hereThis image was taken at f8, 1/50 at 180mm mounted on a tripod and I used a black background to really draw the viewers eye into the picture.