Focusing becomes critical – this is no time to rely on your camera’s autofocus. My Canon 40D generally has a great autofocus, and the ultrasonic motor in my 100mm macro lens is smooth and fast . . . but it’s still no match for a flying bumblebee. The key is to focus fast and then snap a couple shots as you incrementally adjust the focus ring. With a focal plane of a couple millimeters, it’s nearly impossible to tell through the viewfinder whether you are focused on the bee”s head or just a stray hair on its back that is pointed towards the camera. And the autofocus obviously has the same problem. In addition to the fact that when you try to focus on an object that is moving in and out of the focal plane, the autofocus will never manage to get a good lock – it will scan the macro focus range, not find anything, then focus way out in standard mode at which point it probably picks up a tree or something in the background. There goes your beautiful bumblebee photo, because by the time you get your bearings and crank the focus ring back down to macro range it’s gone.

I”ve saved the best for last though . . . I had been frustrated with my inability to create depth in my photos with my macro lens since everything that needs to be in focus has to be in the same plane. Turns out you can trick the eye substantially by rotating the camera. Keep the plane of the lens perpendicular to the subject, but just rotate the camera so that your object spans diagonally across the image. It means thinking a little differently about composition, but it works.

Your other option for creating depth of course is artificial lighting (so that you can use smaller apertures and increase your focal depth). Your flash is not likely to help because the barrel of the lens will cast a shadow on the subject at close proximity. That’s why camera companies make ringlights which mount to the end of the lens. Unfortunately, ringlights are expensive and have a serious drawback – they create perfectly flat lighting. Oh, and they are heavy and bulky, though they do have the advantage of interfacing perfectly with your hotshoe. Anyway. The solution here is to mount a couple LEDs on flexible “antennae” that you can switch on and off. Attach them to your camera, and you should have a perfectly flexible miniature studio for dynamic lighting of small things This is my next project, I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

By the way, the above photos were taken at the Cincinnati Nature Center – a privately owned and amazingly well kept nature preserve that is open to the public. It’s beautiful and secluded, tucked away in Milford . . . I highly recommend it

And yes, I know that I’m getting double apostrophes in my posts and that some of my old images have disappeared . . . working on that – I switched servers recently (upgraded to a dedicated system! ) and it’s screwing with my WordPress installation. Anyway, hopefully just a temporary issue!

I played on two teams for Cincinnati this year (a men’s team, and a co-rec team), and we brought three teams total. I figure that’s pretty impressive even if we didn’t fair terribly well in the tournament The range of skill levels was pretty crazy though – we mercy-ruled one team, then turned around and got mercy-ruled by another. It was a good time altogether, even if I couldn’t walk on Monday. And speaking of tournaments, the Cincinnati Broomball Association and Dayton Broomball Association are jointly sponsoring a tournament this summer! Keep an eye out for BroomFest ’09 – I think it’s going to shape up to be a pretty exciting tournament

I played too much broomball at the Des Moines tournament to take many photos, but I did get to shoot at a game and a half for the third team we brought. I was using my old Canon Rebel (which my friend inherited and brought with her) since it’s relatively compact. Actually, I felt like I was a giant trying to take pictures with a dwarf’s camera. I had gotten so used to my ridiculously oversized 40D that the Rebel was almost too small to hold. Funny how that happens. I still love the Rebel though, it’s a great starter camera. Can’t wait to see the photos, but I have to get my memory card back first

The macro lens does work as a standard 100mm lens quite well, with no additional considerations. Personally I find the 100mm focal length to be a bit awkward for framing, but that”s just me. The only real difference is in closeup shots – I could stick my face a foot away from my subject and still have the 100mm magnification power, but because there is very little incident light when you get this close to a subject the f/stop is usually at its minimum . . . resulting in a miniscule focal depth.

To illustrate, here”s a friendly little salamander I found on the trail. Both shots were taken with the macro, though you can clearly tell that the side view shot had little need for a deep focal plane. The head-on shot was not modified at all – the amount of blur you see is due strictly to the depth (or lack thereof) of the focal plane.

Both of the above images were taken in full daylight with no flash. Ok, well it was filtered daylight since it was foggy, but this was definitely not in the shade. I love the detail in this little guy”s face (though he wasn”t too sure about having my giant camera lens 6″ away from his nose), but I think the excessive amount of blurring along his body really damages this shot. Out of focus would have been fine, but that”s downright blurry. Oh well, live and learn.

Canon 100mm Macro Lens

My new baby. Well, almost. I finally ordered the Canon 100mm Macro USM lens the other day after it”s been sitting on my wishlist for over a year. Why? Well the sucker is expensive, but a macro lens opens up so many possibilities for photography. I can”t wait for my new lens to show up . . .

If you do a little browsing, you”ll find that I picked up one of the more expensive macro lenses out there (excluding Canon”s professional series lenses, which are insanely expensive). But I didn”t just spend extra money for fun – there are some very good reasons for the price of this lens that make it worthwhile: the f-stop, the minimum focal distance, and the USM. The other lens that was in very close competition with this one for me was the 60mm macro USM . . . which basically has the exact same specs except for the focal distance (different from the minimum focal distance I mentioned above). The 100mm lens “zooms in” farther on a subject (though not that this is a fixed focal distance lens, so technically it does not zoom at all!), while the 60mm lens provides a wider angle of view. But considering the small price difference, and the fact that the whole point of macro photography is to get really close to a subject . . . the 100mm made more sense to me.

Ok, so priority #1 when shopping for a macro lens is that it”s actually a macro lens. There are lots of lenses out there that are advertised as being macro, but really aren”t.  Macro means that the image on your CCD is at least 1:1 with the actual object. A normal lens is always less than 1:1, and crazy macro lenses will actually magnify the image bigger than 1:1 (at this point, you have basically converted your camera to a microscope, with all the inherent drawbacks of magnifying things that much. Including diffraction issues, magnifying motion to the point that the shutter click will blur your image, etc).

Now, while a 1:1 ratio may not sound like much, consider that a normal lens will take an image like a portrait (ie a person, maybe 5-6 feet tall in real life), and turn that into an image the size of your CCD which is typically 1/2 inch or less. Ok, so that”s exaggerating things a bit, because you probably know that you can get pretty close to a subject and take a picture of a much smaller area than a person. But most lenses hit their limit at around 3” from the subject, and given a standard viewable angle that means you are looking at around 6″ of real space being projected onto a 1/2″ CCD. So in layman”s terms, the 1:1 macro lens lets you magnify things about 12x bigger than a standard lens. Sound significant now?

Ok, next important part about the macro lens is the f-stop. The f/2.8 available on Canon”s 100mm and 60mm USM macros is about the best (smallest) f-stop I”ve found short of going to professional lenses. The smaller the f-stop number, the more light the lens can let in (ie the bigger the diaphram opens). And with macro photography, where you are often very close to a subject, and taking a picture of something very small (ie less surface for light to reflect off of in the first place), letting in as much light as possible becomes critical.

Minimum focal distance (as opposed to focal distance) is the shortest distance between the subject and CCD of the camera at which the lens can focus. Since the point of macro photography (usually) is to get very close to a very small subject, short minimum focal distance is a good thing. If you”re clever, you may have noticed that the 60mm lens minimum focal distance is 0.65 foot, while the 100mm lens minimum focal distance is 1 foot. So wouldn”t that make the 60mm lens better? Not quite. Remember, this is the distance from the subject to the *CCD*, not the subject to the lens. So subtracting out the length of the lenses, the 60mm lens will be 5″ from the subject, and the 100mm lens will be 7″ from the subject. And then take into consideration that the image on the 100mm lens will be almost double the size (it”s effectively “zoomed in” releative to the 60mm lens).

Ok, and last topic is the USM (ultra-sonic motor). It”s a new buzz-word at Canon, but what it really means is incredibly fast and acurate autofocusing. Which if you”re taking photos of bugs landing on flowers in super close-up, you don”t want to have to worry about your autofocus going spastic. Or god forbid, trying to manually focus on a focal plain that is probably too short for your eye to detect through the viewfinder.

So that”s all the theoretical advice on macro lenses . . . I”ll let you know how it all holds up when I get mine here in a couple days

I started reading a little farther, and the article started throwing in words like “robotic” and “NASA engineered software” – sure fire ways to get a techie’s heart rate up. And then finally it explained what the technology does. It’s a camera mount that moves in a grid pattern to take 50-100 photos of a scene. And then the special software stitches them together into one massive photo. Wow, a robot that . . . wait, it just takes a bunch of photos in a grid arrangement? I’m pretty sure I could build that in my basement. And why do I need a “robot” for that? A few incremental scratch marks on my tripod would accomplish the same thing.

Well maybe it’s the software that’s so special. Let’s see, it takes a bunch of photos laid out on a grid and assembles them into one big photo. That doesn’t sound too hard. But ok, it has to deal with little overlaps between the photos, and any irregularities in the x-y coordinates of the device (though with a robot, I’d hope those are fairly precise!), and some angular distortion resulting from lens construction and the fact that the CCD is larger than a point . . . but doesn’t that free software that came with my camera do that already? Yes, in fact it does. And just in case it doesn’t do a good enough job for you, PS has an amazingly good panorama photo stitcher.

Ok, but all the overkill on the technology aside, you now have a gigapixel image. It’s huge! It has incredible detail! It . . . can’t be viewed on a normal monitor. Well it can, but it looks just like an ordinary photo. That sucks. But look how far you can zoom in! You can view an entire city scape, and then zoom in on a single store sign. Or . . . I could have taken a photo of the city scape, and a photo of the store. In fact, that’s basically what I had to do anyway. I don’t get it – gigapixel images just aren’t cool, not even with NASA engineering.

To recap the previous articles, a) buy a digital camera, b) buy an SLR, c) don”t pay much attention to megapixels. The two most important considerations for the camera are the quality of the optics, and the quality of the CCD (image sensor) . . . and there is no standard measure or marketing term for these factors.

For optics quality, the best cameras are Canons and Nikons – they”ve been the best for years, and continue to outperform other cameras. Between the two brands, optic quality goes back and forth depending on who”s released the latest upgrade. Canon had a better platform for awhile (they”ve been placing the focus motor in the lens rather than the camera body for years, which speeds up the performance among other things), but Nikon recently switched over to a similar platform which is holding its own.

For image sensor quality, Canon and Nikon have also historically lead the pack. Again, quality between the two of them tends to go back and forth model to model. Recently, several new players, most notably Sony, have entered the arena of high quality image sensors. In fact Sony”s CCD is good enough that they teamed up with Carl Zeiss (a microscope and precision optics manufacturer) to try and bring their optics into a competitive range with Canon and Nikon. Sony has been successful in developing a line of SLRs that have Canon and Nikon nervous, but in my opinion they are still playing outside their core competancy and have some work ahead of them before I would recommend one of their cameras.

Between Canon and Nikon as I mentioned, it”s sort of a toss-up on which brand you buy. So why do I buy Canon? Because they have more experience with in-lens motors, because I used to shoot with a 35mm Canon Rebel and got used to the controls, and because all my old lenses are compatable with my new cameras! That”s it.

Canon Rebel XSi

Ok, Canon still has a wide range of SLRs though. So which to buy? I would honestly go with the Rebel XSi to the left. “But that”s the cheap one!” you might say. Right. It”s probably all you need. Even if you”re a budding professional, it”s probably all you need. I shot with the precursor of this model for years, and I upgraded for 1 reason only – I need a faster shooting rate (frames/second) to capture multiple exposures of moving subjects and a larger burst shot capacity (number of photos that can be taken before the memory card write speed slows down the shooting rate). If you don”t need to shoot lots of exposures quickly, there is almost no reason to buy anything more expensive than the Rebel XSi.

Canon 40D

If, on the other hand, you do need high speed shooting capability (for example to minimize blur for HDR photos, or if you are heavy into sports photography), then the Canon 40D is your best value. I know, it”s not Canon”s most expensive model either. I”m trying to save you some money – the new 50D doesn”t add much other than some more megapixels, and a moderately increased useful range for low light photography. That”s it. And the 5D (the next step up) almost triples the price.

By the way, the product links above include both the camera body and a lens. Both cameras are fully compatible with the entire EOS line of lenses, so if you don”t need a lens here is the Rebel Body Only or the 40D Body Only. The 40D actually has a couple options for the lens that comes with it if you buy as a kit, but the 28-135mm included in the above link is probably your best bet quality-wise.

That”s all you should need! Time to get shooting Ok, if you want to browse around Canon”s other offerings by all means go ahead. Or if you want to try your hand with a Nikon, look for cameras with similar price points and features as one of the Canons I mention above. You really can”t go wrong.

Ok, a quick diversion into color space. For all intents and purposes, electronic image formats see pixels in three colors – red, green, and blue (I”m simplifying here, so if you really want the details I will be talking plenty about color space in other posts). Your eye also uses three colors to see, so it makes sense that we replicated that system to reproduce images electronically. Anyway, if you see “purple” it”s actually being produced on your screen by:

• red pixel: on
• blue pixel: on
• green pixel: off

So every “color” requires three pixels. This applies both to the way the camera captures the image (the camera “sees” red pixels, blue pixels, and green pixels) as well as the way your monitor displays the image (with little red, blue, and green lights). But when you save this image, “purple” only takes up one “pixel” in the file, not three. So some manufacturers count the number of *file* pixels that the camera can caputer, and other manufacturers count the number of *sensor* pixels (which is 3x the number of file pixels for the same camera).

But wait, it gets better. Just because the camera”s sensor *records* 12MP of data doesn”t mean that it recorded each pixel acurately! In fact, the amount of noise that can occur in a high density sensor sometimes outweighs the benefit of having more pixels. So why do companies makes cameras with useless pixels? Because most people buy based on megapixels. Oh, and did I mention that 80% of computer monitors (at the time of this writing) are configured to display . . .0.7 megapixels. And a large portion of those monitors are hard capped at 0.7 megapixels. That means you are only using 10% of the pixels in your high resolution image!

Don”t get me wrong, there are lots of reasons to want more pixels than you see. But for purposes of demonstration, let”s take a look at what happens when you have lots of “ok” pixels versus a few “good” pixels. For this example “good” pixels acurately represent the original scene, whereas “ok” pixels have noise in them – characteristic of what one might find in a cheap camera. Think of it as static in the camera”s sensor. Good cameras are static free, but it”s difficult (and expensive) to eliminate the static.

The two images below are identical, shot with a 10 megapixel (good) camera. The image on the top was initially downsampled to just 1 megapixel (throwing out 90% of the original pixels), but the image “quality” was maintained. The image on the right was left at 10 megapixels, but 10% of the pixels were given random static noise. Both images were then resized to a typical monitor viewing size. So which do you prefer, more pixels, or better quality pixels?

Small clean sensor (top) vs big noisy sensor (bottom)

Artists will tell you that photos taken with a daguerreotype can still be beautiful, so focus less on the camera you buy and more on what you do with it!

That said, a camera of some sort is still a prerequisite for taking pictures, so a discussion of your options is probably justified. First choice: film or digital. As much as some purists might insist otherwise, a modern digital camera give you so much more flexability and so many more learning opportunities that there is very little reason to buy a film camera anymore. If you like the aesthetics of a film camera, then by all means buy one. But as a beginner I would highly recommend digital so that you can instantly review the impact of setting changes, you don”t have to worry about “wasting” film, and there are no film developing variations to confound the camera changes you made intentionally.

Next choice: SLR or point-and-shoot. Personally I would always suggest an SLR – nearly all models now have point and shoot capability, but as you learn and grow you will appreciate the additional flexibility that the SLR provides. If you just want to be able to take snapshots . . . well, then I”m not sure why you”re reading this blog. Go buy a point-and-shoot, and stop reading about photography. The two advantages that point-and-shoots have are 1) compact size (sometimes), and 2) less expensive. Before you argue that there are some really expensive point-and-shoots out there, let me just say that the really expensive models offer similar lens performance to an SLR plus two lenses, which definitely makes them cheaper.

So why buy and SLR afterall? Oldschool photographers will tell you that the field you see in the viewfinds matches what shows up in the final picture better, but this is rarely even a consideration anymore due to the ability to digitally crop. And the difference is usually a 90% field of view on a really cheap model to a 95% field of view on a standard SLRto a 98% field of view on a top of the line camera. Think you can really tell the difference? Take a look at the example below:

field of view differences

You can probably tell that the white area around the images changes, but can you really tell the difference in the field of view? From left to right the images represent 98%, 95% and 90% field of view. By the way, that”s an HDR image taken in the Adirondack Mountains (Avalanche Lake to be precise in case you were interested).

So it”s not field of view . . . what makes SLRs so special? The two biggest advantages are the target audience (serious photographers), and the ability to change lenses. Changing lenses is self explanatory, and I will leave a discussion of lenses for another post. But don”t look at me like I”m crazy when I say target audience is important! The camera manufacturer had *you* in mind when (s)he designed the SLR, which means there is no compromise in accessability of truely powerful functions. In layman”s terms, this means it”s easy to screw up a photo. In photographer”s terms, it”s the difference between capturing a great photo and missing it. Point-and-shoot manufacturers hide the powerful features – the ones that were often the *only* controls on film cameras – buried in layers and layers of menus. You will never manage to dig out the shutter speed control in time to capture a hummingbird hovering or the ferrari tearing up your suburban street. The reason is to prevent people who don”t know what they”re doing from accidentally setting these controls incorrectly. But you”re not one of those people. You want to take *really* good photos, not just better snapshots. Right?

Stay tuned, details on specific SLRs is coming tomorrow . . . or maybe later today