-16°C overnight, and pretty cold today, but sunny. I’ve been down with some sort of chest cold/cough/sore throat so I won’t be going out today for any close-ups. However it’s a perfect day to do close-up photos indoors by a sunny window.
I’ve heard a couple of people comment that one of the attractions of close-up photography is seeing tiny details you can’t otherwise see so I decided to look for subjects with good details.
My first subject was a sea urchin. Photographed in direct sun through a window. Moment Macro. iPhone 8 Plus. PureShot. RAW image format (DNG).
View attachment 119207
Looking at the photo the first thing I noticed is that the white bumps actually have tiny knobs on top rather than being simple bumps.
Since it is a curved subject there is no way to have more than a limited portion in focus. Instead, I chose to shoot across the curve causing a greater degree of focus fall-off. I found the magnified screen viewer very helpful to see when I was getting the focus in the right place. As I looked through the screen viewer it could see that the slightest vibration caused the image to dance. My tripod setup is quite solid but still there are vibrations. I used the 10 second self timer to allow things to settle down before the image was made. I wondered how important this would be. Certainly at 1/30 second exposure it would be very important. Checking my actual shutter speed, at my chosen ISO20, turned out to be 1/1250. That gave me some added confidence that if there was a slight vibration the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the motion.
View attachment 119206
I presume this is some sort of coral.
View attachment 119208
Here’s my set-up. Photographed with the Gimbse camera app to keep the verticals parallel. Pretty darned handy.
Note the paint brush. I keep finding whenever I do close-ups that I have to retouch dirt and dust that I couldn't see before hand. Giving my subjects a good dusting really makes a difference. Not very useful for butterfly wings
though.
For a general discription, I have my very solid close-up tripod set up with a 90° bracket and my macro focusing rail, and then my phone attached pointing straight down, with Moment Macro attached, but without its diffusion hood because it would cause a shadow in this direct light. On top of my phone there is a magnified screen viewer so I can see the focus more accurately, and adjust the focus with the focusing rail.
Below the camera you can see the sea urchin positioned on edge in a wire holder attached to a pretty solid bracket. I figured that angle would help reveal subject details.
At the bottom I have a piece of cardboard with black velvet glued on. The reverse side is a grey card. It was actually made for another purpose but it serves well here. The black velvet is angled away from the sun to make sure it is really black. If the sun skims across the black velvet and highlights a speck of dust it can show as a white blob in the background.
There’s another magnified screen viewer in the lower left. They are both home made items. The corner one has a +13 viewing lens and the height was determined to put the screen in best focus. It is made of plastic scrounged from a dead computer case. The one on my phone at the moment is made of thin aluminum and folds flat.
The following comparison pair shows the difference in detail between direct sun compared to diffused light made by leaning a diffusion panel against the window.
View attachment 119204
Upper photo - direct sun. Lower photo - diffused light. Technically, both photos are equally “sharp” but the lighting quality makes a difference in how we see the fine details.
View attachment 119205
Direct sun is quite “hard”. Not very nice for portraits of people because it picks up every pore and blemish, and the shadows exhibit very abrupt fall-off. Diffused light is much better for portraits and many other subjects, but it is clear that the best details in this case were revealed by direct hard light, especially at this skimming angle.
I did my first few RAW photo edits in Snapseed. Then I decided to try some edits in other apps, as well. RAWPower, Darkroom, and Affinity Photo. I’m still at the stage with RAWPower and Darkroom that I’m looking around for the controls I want. They both get the job done well enough.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that they all use Apple’s RAW engine. A RAW file has a particular set of adjustments available and beyond that you just use the same controls you use for other file types. The problem is that not all apps agree on how to name those controls but you can soon enough figure them out. None of the apps can invent any new controls that the other don’t have because it is all defined within Apple’s RAW engine. The difference is in the convenience of layout and the additional information that can be provided by things like histograms and highlight and shadow warnings.
It would be nice if all the controls you need to work on a RAW file could be organized in one window and in the best sequence of use. However the screen size isn’t big enough to display them all so they tend to be grouped by topic. Not everyone agrees on the groupings.
Snapseed seems to work as well as any for RAW files. It doesn’t have any of the fancy layout or graphics that can make it more informative to work on an image, especially when it comes to keeping track of highlight and shadow values going out of bounds.
The iPad versions of the apps certainly have more room to display the workspace to better advantage.
The operating system has its own idea on the type of processing that makes your jpeg photos look best but this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t take into consideration some photos might be made at a very low ISO and not require so much noise reduction, which smears image details. All digital images require sharpening, but how much. Different images have different requirements.
The advantage of using the built-in image processing is that in many cases your pictures are good-to-go right out of the camera with no extra fiddling require. Not so with RAW images. They tend to look rather dull at first compared to jpegs. Every single one will require “developing”. That’s what many people call the extra steps required to prepare a RAW image so it looks as good as the jpegs. Beyond that you employ your usual editing techniques. However, you start your editing with a better quality image.
Not every image needs the extra advantages of RAW and for all the everyday images jpeg is perfectly fine. For those situations where highlight control is essential or image details are important to you than RAW is the way to go.
Here’s another important feature of RAW images. They are capable of capturing a bigger dynamic range than jpegs. Especially in the highlight region. Which all means you have a much better chance to successfully record highlight detail in RAW images that would be lost in jpegs.
One reason to switch to RAW is to bypass the heavy handed processing bestowed upon all jpeg images. However, that means you are now on full manual when it comes to image processing and every RAW image will require adjustments to sharpening, noise reduction, and saturation, adjustments that previously were done for you (some would say done TO you).
So, yes, RAW image processing is more work and more time consuming. But I think you will find the greater image quality makes it all worthwhile.
Me, too. I think two weeks is not too long for something that's a workshop rather than a challenge. And it gives time for others to watch what's going on and get interested enough to join in. What with doing things for MC, B/W, and Appstracts, plus repairing a dryer, I haven't had time to compare the Moment macro to the Zeiss macro, try shooting with a tripod, or work much on improving my handheld technique.
). For me, 3 weekdays is not much time to take “lots of pictures”... unless it’s just stuff around my apartment or stuff at my office, all of it pretty boring. And by the time I get home these days it’s dark, so no light to work with.
