Rodney Campbell's Blog

On Saturday mornings my three daughters have swimming lessons and then my eldest has a piano lesson. There is this quaint little church opposite where the lessons are held so in true sad case photographer style I decided to use the opportunity to take some shots and experiment a little. My middle daughter also received a little Canon point and shoot for Christmas so we all got to run around and snap some shots.

This was a chance to further try my new Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens both for portrait shots and some not so fantastic macro flower shots.

Macro photography really needs stability to work well – at this close range any infinitesimal movement is disaster because of a number of factors (including the fact that the area in focus can often be a millimetre deep so any movement will kill the shot). Some tips for good macro photography (pretty much most of which I ignored today!!):

• Must use a tripod!
• Keep the subject still (e.g. no wind)
• Use a remote shutter release or self timer (so that the act of firing the shutter doesn’t introduce vibration)
• At this range depth of field is tiny so a sufficient aperture (f/11, f/16, f/22 or above) is a ideal
• Focus manually (autofocus tends to hunt – a lot!)
• Soft light (overcast day)
• Don’t shoot down on flowers (shoot from the side or even from below)

In the case of today I had to shoot handheld because I didn’t have a tripod with me and we had lots of light breeze which was blowing these flowers all over the place – so I guess it’s lucky I got any macro shots that were even half usable – it was fun to play however…

The first two shots are with my Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. I then switched to the Tamron 90mm for the remainder of the shots.

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I think the next two shots are probably my favourites of the girls.

This shot shows how shallow the depth of field is at f/4.0 with this lens – I focused on the eyes of my eldest daughter and by the time we get across to my middle daughter who’s face is perhaps only two or three centimetres behind the focus is nicely thrown out.

The first of my macro (and not very at that) flower shots (with swaying flower heads in the breeze!!!!) and even at f/13 you can see how shallow the zone of focus is – just the back petals of the front flower along with the stem of the back flower are in focus.

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I just couldn’t capture a good shot of the lavender (too much swaying and slow shutter speed) but the colours were very nice so I thought I’d include it anyway 🙂

There were some spectacular frangipani’s in the grounds (and my daughters love these flowers) so we had to attempt a few shots of these as well.

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I wish I’d a bit more time to setup and take these shots a little better plus the midday sun was getting pretty harsh – but by now the girls had had about enough of me taking photos 🙂 so they were pretty restless andt I just had to fire a few quick ones off.

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