New to Macro

kris10jo

I know this isn't the most original concept (flower with a black background), but I wanted to try it out for myself. Feedback is always appreciated. Thanks for looking!

Lord Vetinari

Looks good, can't comment on the originality aspect, I did some similar shots yesterday
Brian V.

R.Jay

Hi Kristen, Beautiful - the dark background is very effective.

Cheers, Richard.

Eddy

i like that ,... i see so many shot with black back grounds is the distance of the lens form the subject or as you move towards the subject it gets darker
in the back ground...All in All its very nice

DeVerm

kris10jo wrote:

I know this isn't the most original concept (flower with a black background), but I wanted to try it out for myself. Feedback is always appreciated. Thanks for looking!

Kris,

I'm new to this too so I'm not sure if my remarks are of any value but I'll give them anyway so that others can comment on that again and we all learn ;-)

For this kind of photo, I would adjust the aperture so that the whole flower gets focus if that is possible. I would crop it 1:1 aspect, stamp the out of focus green part away and move the watermark to a corner and make it more subtle (smaller) too.

If I couldn't get focus on the whole flower with my macro lens, I would even try another lens because I just found some good results with my 17-55mm in close up too...

ciao!
Nick.

kris10jo

Thank you all for the feedback!

Nick, thank you for the suggestions. I think I got a little carried away with trying to shoot wide open and will definitely keep that in mind for the next time. It would be nice to have all of the flower in focus. And I like the suggestions for cropping and cloning out the green. I'll give it a try.

And you're right about the watermark; it's a bit intrusive. I just started using watermarks a few days ago and am still working on getting it to look right.

Again, thank you!

Kristen

paddler4

Depth of field is extremely narrow at macro distances, and battling for more DOF is a key part of macro. So, shooting wide open is rarely the way to go, unless you want a lot of material blurred. What you will find is that people debate how far to close the lens down to get more DOF, at the cost of softness from diffraction. Some people here don't go beyond f/14-16 for that reason. I sometimes go to f/20 or even 22 because I find the extra DOF more important than the slight softening. This problem is why many people posting here end up stacking multiple images in software.

I may be wrong, but I don't think Nick's advice about changing lenses will matter much. DOF is primarily a function of aperture and distance, and if you use different lenses but frame the subject to occupy the same amount of the frame, you should not see much difference in DOF. See http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm

kris10jo

Thank you, paddler4. What a great tutorial; thank you for sharing that! I will start experimenting more with DOF for sure. I do like the separation of the subject being as clear as possible with a blurry background in most of my shots, but in this case, the black background doesn't really matter. But I'm definitely interested in trying to get the sharpest image possible with the equipment I have available to me. The best lens I have is a 50mm 1.4, so I tried my best to make the best of it with that.