After the past few days, this is the best weather day we have had in a bit! Perfect time for Mother’s Day to celebrate your mom, grandma, great-grandma (I can think of at least one) and share the day with her if you are so blessed. I am getting ready to head out to see mine, so this will not be a long post. Wishing all the mothers reading this post a Happy Mother’s Day!
By all means, I am privileged to have known so many amazing mothers. My mom emigrated from the Philippines. Since she arrived here, she has been motherly to many of her patients. Given that I am an only child, she had plenty of time to keep her eye on me!
Additionally, I see other examples of caring, involved mothers from my cousins and other family members. In like fashion, my cousins have similar stories of their mothers guiding them as we grow up. Even though I did not grow up with them every day, I still have the same reverence and respect for what they do. Undoubtedly raising our generation could not have been easy!
If you are looking to make extreme close-up photos of a subject, macro lenses allow you to make photos of a subject in a very different way than other lenses. What makes macro lenses different from other lenses, is that it is possible to shoot very close to your subject. The minimum focus distance on these lenses are much lower meaning you can get closer. Subsequently you fill the frame with a detail of your subject and still focus clearly. Most regular lenses require more distance from your subject. Only then will the lens be able to focus on a subject clearly.
Macro Photography
On point and shoot cameras, this is usually represented by a flower symbol, so I’ll use them here. The lens that I used for these is the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor which produces tack sharp images of really tiny subjects. The details can be so large in the frame using this lens! At the minimum focus distance of this lens, the subject can be rendered 1:1. This means that when the lens is set to 1:1, the size of the detail you are photographing will be exposed on the sensor at EXACTLY the same size – making things like pollen on a flower easily visible.
In these next two photos, I changed my settings a bit from the first two. This relates to the aperture or depth of field in the photos. The first two were exposed at an aperture of f/4 which is very wide open for this lens at this close to the subject. In order to get much more in focus with macro subjects, a smaller aperture is needed to make the entire flower and its details in focus. For these next two, the aperture was set at f/32! Additional flash was needed, but the entire flower is in focus – perfect for documenting them for textbooks or other collections.
One of the first lessons I learned in photography was that cameras “see” much different from the human eye. If you look around a closed room, then out a window, not only does the eye focus much faster than any lens, but it can take in much more detail than you realize. This happens so quickly, that you do not even realize drastic light condition changes. With this in mind, HDR photography can render a scene closer to this.
High Dynamic Range Photography
When studying photography, you can see that you have to make compromises. In a high contrast scene, such as a bright sunny day, you cannot have a blue sky and shadowless subjects in the foreground without some help. You either have a beautiful sky with your subjects in silhouette, or dark shadow, or you have a completely “blown out” white sky with detail in your foreground subject. You do have some options if you want to manipulate the light such as flash or bouncing light to your subjects with a reflector, but I want to post today about another new option that has become popular with the advancement of computers – HDR or High Dynamic Range photography.
HDR is an option for shooting with the new iPhone 5. The idea behind it is to take multiple images of your scene. In a 3-image HDR, one of the images will be underexposed, one will be exposed properly as determined by your meter, and one will be overexposed. Here is an example from the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC. I took these during late morning – the sun was already high in the sky, and it was difficult to get both a blue sky in the photo, and to read the text on the memorial.
In this first photo, the frame is overexposed but you can clearly read the text. The sky is bright white with no detail, and some of the cherry blossoms are washed out as well.
This is the correctly exposed photo using the Matrix Metering in my Nikon DSLR. It is the most even across the frame in terms of dark tones and light tones.
This is the underexposed frame – most everything is in shadow, only good detail in the sky and other bright parts of the frame. With these 3 images, you combine them in software. For this, I used Google’s Nik HDR Efex pro 2. The software stacks the images, and uses calculations to increase the dynamic range of light and dark tones in the photograph to get a better approximation of what your eye sees when you are standing at the memorial. Let me know it turned out! There are many plugins and other techniques to combine with HDR to make scenes look either more realistic, or surrealistic depending on your preferences. It is always nice to have options. Here is the final HDR photo –
