Adventures in Macro Photography

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.

More Flash and Water

I quite like working with water so I putting a couple of recent ones from a recent set I did in the shower. This also demonstrates a principal it took me a while to understand about freezing motion, normally if you want to freeze a stream or a fast moving car you up your shutter speed to say 1/1000, this is fine if you are out side but a bit different indoors as most cameras can only synchronise their shutter with the flash to speeds of about 1/250 (this is the cameras x-sync speed). This always panicked me as 1/250 isn't really fast enough to freeze the water BUT as a scene like this is lit with flash only, ie no ambient light the duration of the flash is a lot quicker than 1/250 so you could actually leave your shutter open for say 1/30 which is nowhere near fast enough to freeze water but as long as there is no (or little) ambient light the flash will be enough to stop the motion of the water. These two were taken at f6.3 for 1/200 at 170mm ISO 100. It was lit with a single speedlite to the camera left and I had a piece of orange card behind the shower. The levels were tweaked in Lightroom after, another rainy day project.

Running a Bath

This was just a quick abstract I took last night whilst the bath was running, I've manipulated the colours in lightroom and added a radial gradient in photoshop, thats the greenish curve. It was all fairly experimental, but I was in a bathroom with no windows!