Macro Photography in the English Garden

Frau A and I spent another morning in Munich's English Garden.  After some "regular" photos, she spotted some caterpillars in a nearby tree and we changed to macro mode for them, a small smail, and a fly.

Note:  I replaced my old Olympus E-PM2 with the newer Olympus E-M5, and have the Panasonic 45-200mm lens with the Canon 500D close-up lens for macro (also using a flash in the hot shoe).

The caterpillars here are maybe 3cm long, and the fly perhaps 1.5cm.  The experts on dpreview.com forums are right -- focusing and DOF are very challenging.  But we're having a lot of fun learning.  My best 5 shots below.

Click on the shots to get a slightly larger version.

Caterpillar hanging from a thread (I like the bokeh and how it framed):

Fly on a leaf:

Caterpillar climbing:

Caterpillar and small snail on the same leaf!

Another fly - he didn't hang around long:

I will be trying the Canon 250D close-up lens on the Panasonic 45-200mm lens to get more magnification -- so we'll see if I can learn to improve focus, lighting, etc. in the future... 

If anyone has tips for us on technique, etc., feel free to leave a comment of course.

Signs of Spring

A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, I feel alive again...spring finally is here! 

 

 

Though most of the trees and flowers are still only budding leaves, there were a few early bloomers out at the Botanical Gardens. 

 

And of course many great flowers inside the greenhouses.

 

We're still a few months too early for the baby ducks and geese, but for now we have turtles.

 

 

And most of the trees in Munich are starting to show signs of life.  Interesting that Munich is a couple of weeks behind Frankfurt. These are the trees budding in the Bavariapark here in Munich. Last week in Frankfurt, the leaves were out and plum trees covered in bloom.

 

 

I've never seen anything quite like these blue and yellow ones, also at the Botanical Garden in Munich. 

 

Some of last year's swan babies hanging out in the pond at Schloss Nymphenburg. 

 

Even better, we can finally eat dinner outside again. The Augustiner am Dom has interesting signs of spring. Not just the Easter-ish table cloths, but that they seem to have lamb as their current seasonal menu. I do think of cute fluffy lambs at Easter, but it feels a bit odd to feature them as dinner! We had flammkuchen instead....

 

 And best of all? Spring means the beer gardens are open again!  

Hard to believe how quickly things changed. This is the Nymphenburger Kanal, only a few weeks apart. We went from people on the ice to algae and ducks swimming. 

Butterflies in Macro - Part 2

More macro shots of the butterfly exhibit at the Botanical Garden. 

Though this one was a special exhibit, Vienna has a permanent butterfly house (Schmetterlinghaus) near the opera. I love butterflies, so we'll have to visit next time we're in Vienna.

 

There were several dishes with fruit or dots of nectar for the butterflies to enjoy.

I love the textures in this one and the greens and browns. 

This pale one enjoyed a spot of nectar, while giving us a great reflection

 

 

Butterflies in Macro - Part 1

This past weekend, we spent Sunday morning at the Botanical Garden. They have a special butterfly exhibit, which runs through 25 March. A perfect opportunity to get up close and personal with the butterflies and my lovely macro lens. Definitely a bit of a challenge to use, but beautiful results. I'm still working on getting the proper focus, but I love that we can capture their faces too, and the lens has a gorgeous, creamy background. 

One of my favorites - for the color and the closeup of his face 

Kinda cute with his curly proboscis

I'd really love to see the Monarch migration one day. 

Not sure where these come from, but they have a beautiful blue and brown combination I hadn't seen before

Another of the blue and brown ones.

Cool how these have blue and black polka-dotted eyeballs!

More to follow tomorrow....

Macro Photography, This Time Bigger

Herr J's post on Macro Photography with Compact Cameras inspired me to give a try with a larger camera. So, while in New York last month, I picked up a Tokina 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens.

Getting the lens turned out to be a bit of an adventure....per my usual luck, I was only in the city for one weekend. After a 45 minute walk to B&H, I discovered they were closed for Purim (and always on Saturday). OK, I thought, this is a good excuse for a first visit to Adorama. And, Purim strikes again. Luckily, Herr J in his dual roles as personal electronics guru and source of all NYC knowledge, found that J&R had the lens and was open that weekend.

Fast forward a month, after getting home and trying to get back into the routine of having a job, I finally had a chance to try it out this morning in the little shopping passage across the street. Much fun for us, and amusement for the waiters at the Italian restaurant.

The verdict: I think I'm going to love this lens. Great on macro, beautiful bokeh, great colors....Not sure how it compares to the Nikon version, but all reports are that it's pretty similar quality...at half the price.

The Asam Passage area is lined with cafes and planters full of tulips, daffodils, hydrangeas, and tons of colorful spring flowers.  

Love these unusual daffodils! 

The ferns are just now coming out to join the tulips in the sun.

 

Another of the striped tulips - it was such a cool surprise to see all the pollen collecting in the bottom.

This one, along the Isar river.  

Though we didn't come across many cool insects to photograph on this outing, it was fun to stop and smell the roses - or at least to look at them in detail and notice so much that we usually miss when hurrying by.

My high hopes for the lens were definitely met on the macro side of things. But what I didn't expect was that it would be such a nice lens for "normal" use. And being a prime lens, it definitely makes me work a little bit more to compose the picture.

Here on the left, two girls relaxing in the afternoon where the city is renovating a part of the Isar River. What I love about this picture, is that is does NOT look at all like Munich - with the light stone and pale blue water, I would place it more a winter day in Spain or Turkey.

And on the right, the beautiful golden late afternoon light. I love this city in the spring!

Macro Photography with compact cameras

I rambled a bit about trying to get decent night photos from a compact camera in that previous post, but now it's time for some random thoughts about "marco" photography with compact cameras.  Macro photography can be simply defined as capturing small subjects.  Technically, a macro shot is when the light image that hits the sensor is close to the same size as the actual subject (thanks, Wikipedia).  Think of a mountain landscape:  on the sensor, the "picture" will be small.  If you capture an insect at a macro level, the "picture" on the sensor will approach the size of the insect in real life.  This differentiation is important to pros because it changes the mechanics of lens/light/etc.  I don't know such details, but try to take macro shots anyway.

There are two methods of going macro:  either use a zoom lens (that can focus in a macro setting), or put the front of the lens really close to the subject.  For campact cameras, even ones with quite a bit of zoom like my now-dead Canon SX200IS, only the second is really available.  Here is one of my favorites taken in garden here in Germany.  (Don't jump!)

In this case, the front of the lens was probably 3cm from the insect itself.  Many DSLRs have a minimum distance between lens and subject, often measured in feet.  Fortunately, most compact cameras today have the minimum distance specified in centimeters, and some are effectively 0cm!  In other words, the subject can basically be touching the front of the lens, but the camera will still be able to focus and capture the shot.  For whatever reason, this insect allowed me to get the lens to about 6cm from it.  The colors turned out great, and there was not a lot of movement so I didn't get much subject blur and got some neat detail.

 

The challenge of getting the lens so close to a subject is not only that the subject may be disturbed and move away, but the camera itself starts to cast a shadow -- because the lens is so close to the subject, it starts blocking light from reaching the subject!  In this example below, the day was clear and the sun was bright.  However, the sun was overhead, so getting too close for a top down pic just made it dark.  Therefore, I had to change my angle to ensure enough light hit the bee.  It creates a nice effect on the flower, but I could not get nearly as close as with the prior photo.

Even with the bright sun (and therefore lots of light and a fast shutter speed) insects are difficult.  They move lots, and quickly.  In the example below, the spider let me get just a few centimetes away, but was constantly moving.  That made it difficult for the compact camera to achieve focus (it kept "hunting"), and when it did, some of the spider's legs are blurry.  Still fun to take and look at, though.

 

The other challenge with focusing:  when the lens is that close to the subject, even with a smaller sensor you get a shallow depth of field.  Notice here that I wanted to get the ants in focus, but my camera kept grabbing a part of the plant.  I should have used "spot" focus mode, to tell the camera specifically where I wanted it to focus on.  Too bad, the ant "checking me out" would have been great in focus!

The upside of macro photography with a compact camera (and its small sensor) is that you get some "bokeh" -- the "blurred" section in the background.  Bokeh is not something you can usually get with these cameras.  In this case, the blue makes an interesting addition to the scene.

Like night photography, these are not professional examples, but fun for me.  I really recommend you experiment with your camera.  It can be fun to see what comes out, just don't get bitten.