Members Photographic Articles

Creative Fun with Abstract Macro

After creating my little homemade macro setup, I've been like a little kid with a new toy, photographing everything I could get my hands on. By doing this and reading various articles in magazines and in forums, I've come to realize how creative you can be in your own little homemade studio and get captures just like to see on billboards or advertisements.

Take a look at the two images below. One is shot at f29 with a five second exposure, and the other at f4.5 and a 1/8 second exposure. The difference is obvious immediately. The first shot focuses on the majority of the glasses. The second focuses more on the center of the glasses, giving more of an abstract feel.

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Version 1	Version 2

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Getting Creative

Before we get stuck into getting creative, a quick look into using aperture mode. Logically you would think the smaller the f-stop number, then the smaller the aperture would be. However, in photography it works the opposite way. f2.8 actually gives a large aperture, resulting in a far narrower focus range (image #2). Using an aperture setting of f29 gives you more of the area in focus.

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Click to toggle zoom	When doing still life at home, its essential you have your camera mounted on a tripod, wether it be a tabletop tripod or your normal outdoor tripod. Holding a camera by hand for an exposure time of 5 seconds will result in some wacky patterns, but you would not be able to see what the capture actually is! Enough blurb, lets have some more fun. Before deciding on the final image (above), I first went through different aperture settings, starting from f4.5, then moving up in increments ending up at f25. At f4.5, I found too much of the image was out of focus, but at f8.0, the prongs tips and part of the main fork were begining to come into focus. f16 brought the majority of the forefront of the fork into focus, and started to bring some, but not too much detail of the handle and the object over on the far right. Finally, at f25 even more of the capture was in focus, but too much for the effect I was after. Eventually I settled on f16 with a shutter speed of 1/3 second. After adjusting the settings slightly in RAW format, the final image was ready. For the above image I had my 70-300mm zoom lens, along with a +2 magnifying filter. Lighting was provided by one desktop lamp set at an angle to give me the elongated shadow of the fork. Because of the exposure timing and f-stop, the camera was mounted on a tripod and I used a cable release to remove any possible camera shake. Over on the left you can see all images I took, so you can see the difference with the aperture settings. You can see the difference in each capture, although the difference between the third and last image is very subtle. It will depend on what type of final capture you want as to the final outcome of aperture setting you use. Like I did, take several exposures hand scrutenise each image before setteling on the one you want. From here you can use Photoshop to add any other effects that suit your purpose. Try applying the Diffuse Glow or Noise filter for another type of effect.
f4.5
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f8
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f16
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f25

Let's take a look at using the 18-70mm wide-angle lens, next. Both captures below were taken with a focal length of 70mm and the program setting set to macro. As you can see, the first image is pretty much, for the main, in focus, and quite a bit of background to play with. Where as the second image, the element inside the bulb is in focus, and the rest of the bulb is not.

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1/125 sec at f5.6	1/125 at f4.5

There are two differences in these two captures (arpart from the second one being more full frame). As mentioned both had a focal lenght of 70mm, and camera set to macro mode. The first image was shot with and exposure time of 1/125 sec at f5.6 and the second at 1/125 at f4.5, giving a one stop difference. That's the first thing that is different. The second is that I used a +3 magnifyer filter, which you can see, has let me get in a lot closer.

If I had used the 70-200mm lens, I would have found it more difficult to get the correct composition without having to have the camera about five feet away (to get full frame). Had I used a filter, then I would have got the element inside the bulb up close. At the end of the day, it depends on what sort of image you are wanting to capture, whether it be like the abstract fork image effect, if something like the bulb images above.

One thing is for certain, you will get no end of fun trying to create different type of captures out of things.