The Lighting & Exposure Commander for Macro Photography

Posted Thursday, April 15th, 2010 by Adam

Macro: Bee - by Travlinman

Macro photography is a skill that can be honed easily by both amateur photographers and total beginners. When you look at a subject that you have in hand, with your camera, a downright beginner will always be capsized with macro photography (most of them, if not all). Just turn your head around and ask your few friends.

Macro lenses are great because to a certain extent, it allows you to look at the bokeh and sharpness of the object in your camera’s viewfinder much more efficiently. Don’t know what’s a viewfinder?

Inside the viewfinder of Nikon D80

The picture above shows the viewfinder of a Nikon D80.

Although we’ll very much like to jump into the intricacies of a good macro shot (exposure, lighting, f-stops, types of lenses, etc.), explaining it in general terms would seem pretty un-understandable. So let’s move on.

Lotus Flower, by Ken Low

Often, what we get from camera flashes isn’t absolute: A professional shot will only look like a professional shot after some changes made to the photo. For example, the lotus flower above taken by Ken Low isn’t edited: It was taken with a 300mm lens with natural lighting. Although looking slightly a little blur to the center and some shadowing beneath the lotus plant, he has a trick under his sleeve.

Dragonfly by Des Chang.

Or, on the other hand, you can also use a flash and some editing to produce a stunningly beautiful result like that. This is normal practice among macro photographers.

So what’s the trick?

Many photographers come to C3 to ask about this thing called the Macro LED Ring Light – With 48 LED lamps glowing out of a diffused ring of light around your lens, it gives you powerful light to a range of up to 100cm (40 inches) and allows directional changes for shadowing purposes (24 LED lamps lit on the left/right only).

Macro Ring Head and Power Controller

After opening up one box for testing, C3′s members took 2 AA batteries and plugged them in for power. Here are some of the surprises:

1. Close-up shots can allow pinhole apertures of up to f/22 with the Ring Light at full power. This means the 48 LED lamps are powerful.
2. A lit up shot allows for faster shutter speed. Good during photographing wildlife and insects. E.G. f/11 at 1/800.
3. Twisting the Ring Light attachment is allowed, so turning it from vertical lighting (light shining straight from the left) to horizontal lighting (light shining from top down) was possible. This allows close-up shots for insects such as spiders (to get different color tones on their body).
4. On another spider shot, its web looks obvious and not fading off after pre-processing. Regular flashlights does a good job, too. But this one is simple and enables lighting previews.
5. What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG): The Ring Light shines on the subject and the viewfinder shows exactly what your camera sensor will capture, in a much more clear, example-friendly fashion.
6. For portrait shots, it allows you to reduce shadowing and get a good preview of how the lighting condition will be like, even from beyond 40 inches.

Unfortunately, for some of our friends with 72 mm, 77 mm, 82 mm, 86 mm and 95mm lenses were not able to fix it on their camera, as this one only provides six of which: 49mm, 52mm, 58mm, 62mm and 67mm.

If you want to give it a go, just let us know, pop by our place and we can show you what’s cooking with this ring light!

Call Christine at 03-8063 6089 to enquire.