Hello and welcome to Out of the Darkroom
on AdoramaTV. I'm Ruth Medjber and
today I'm joined again by macro
photographer Chris Connolly
So Chris, if you could do us the
honour of telling us a little bit about all
the gear that you'd use in macro photography
because I would shoot music and
portraits. Very, kind of, run-of-the-mill
stuff. I've never once attempted macro
because, in my mind, you need a whole lot
more equipment. And I'm probably right, am I?
You are right, but you can get by with little.
I started out with the Canon 100mm,
dedicated macro lens because it's
kind of a dual purpose lens.
It is excellent. It's a 1:1,
regarding the Macro. But it's
a good general lens as well.
I used that for a while and when I
started off with the Macro photography,
I would've used natural daylight.
It's simple, it's good, but the sun
comes from one direction. So you're going to
be exposing for the part of the insect that
the sun is shining on. Which means, then,
there's going to be another dark point. The
whole point about macro is to get in and see all of the
details. So in the beginning I would've used
a piece of A4 paper
and just folded it up into a
quarter and just hold the far side,
like a little reflector. Like a tiny reflector.
Like everything with macro, it's the same as your typical
studio but you're bringing it down to
the smaller scale.
Even then,
that was simple enough and it worked alright but
when I was on holidays, obviously the
insects were a little bit more exotic.
And sunlight, as you know, can
be very harsh. So then you would have to
shade them and use your
reflector.
The problem then was, your ISO
would start to go up.
And the whole point,
the whole ambition or goal of
macro is to get an image that's sharp
and keep the ISO as low as
possible.
So that's how I started out. Then I
would have, let's say, taken the cheap
way out of it and I would have used LED flashlights.
You can handhold them
and again with your reflector. Or else, if you
had it, we recreated a little
mini environment
at home. You would have a
boom mike stand, or whatever, and you'd
have the little flashlight hanging down.
Like a torch, just an LED panel?
Believe it or not it does help.
Of course, it sounds brilliant!
The subject, let's say, is that size and the head
of the torch, the light part, will be
this size. So in relation...
That's a big softbox to us.
OK I get it now! It's a lot easier for me.
Now that you've
mentioned a softbox, before I got the
flashes, when I was in college I had an
Elinchrom, studio setup.
I think somebody
mentioned it before, they would
have been taken down and set up every day.
On the last episode that was the first thing I got.
At one stage, for the
cockchafer beetle, I used a softbox.
Now, the insect again was this size and
the softbox was this size. It was
completely ridiculous
But it actually worked.
If it works, it works. That's brilliant.
After that then, I kind of realized
I'm going to have to get
the proper "professional" equipment.
So then I invested in the Canon Twin Lite
Flash.
When I bought that,
it doesn't come with any diffusers or anything,
so I was using it and the light was very harsh.
So I got two diffusers, like
like you would get on your normal flash.
That didn't really work either.
So I had to make up two miniature
softboxes. Now again, they would've been
probably two inches by three.
They were made out of the tops of
oil cans for the engine of the
car, sprayed black, then you got softbox
material and used velcro.
They weren't the prettiest but
they worked really well.
If it works, it works. That's fantastic!
So, is that what you're currently
using, the Twin-Head Flash?
It is, yeah.
To me it's really fascinating because
I never would have thought
about it like that, that you're just taking a
studio environment making it
small.
Because it's a Twin-Light Flash,
one flash is used as the
main flash. Then the other one, instead
of using a reflector, because with the Canon Twin
Lite you can have more
light from one than you can have from the other.
So one is up high and, we'll say, it's on a
scale of 8. The other one is down low
and it might be only on
a scale of 2, or setting of 2 power wise.
So that's acting as a reflector.
So, everything looks natural as it would in their
natural environment.
Is that key to you,
that you really want it to look like it's
natural?
Yes definitely. When you pick the
subject, you want to get in
closer and closer and closer.
So there's other ways, like
attachments you can get. There's a
product called a Raynox DCR-250.
It's a little, tiny little lens
that clips onto the
front of the macro lens and it gives you
2.5x magnification instead of 1:1.
Then you're
getting in a little bit closer.
I mean, this Raynox is only about
that in depth. So it's not really
bulking up the whole thing.
The thing about
macro too is, most
of the time I use Live View mode
and manual focus. As we
said before, when you're doing a
portrait, the eyes have to be focused.
Likewise with the insects.
With Live View mode,
you can get 5x
magnification and 10x
magnification. That's just to view subject
so you can get right in there and you
can focus on the eyes.
The problem is, with f/2.8,
you're letting in the most light
but it also means that the depth of
focus is tiny. So you really want to be
using f/16 or f/18 but if you're
using f/18 in Live View mode, you
won't see anything.
You have to introduce, then, a little
LED panel up on top so that you can see the
insect, the subject at f/16.
What I used to do is, I used to focus at f/8
and then switch it to f/16, even though
you don't see anything but you know it's
focused.
So that saved that and
that's why I had to get the LED panel.
The hard ones are the ones with wings
because if it flies, it's just gone.
If a beetle runs away you can
catch him and put him back.
This would be me, I'm at f/8, I'm pulling focus,
switching to f/16 and then by the time I
go and take the shot it's gone!
That's often happened.
You must have the patience of
a saint to do this.
Well that's probably why
a lot of people don't do this.
Sometimes when we get
an insect, I will put them into the
fridge for a few seconds.
It doesn't do them any harm.
All it does is slow
down their metabolism.
Like we said earlier on, when the lizard comes out
and he's cold, he can't really move
until he's heated up. So when you put
them into the fridge it slows them down.
So you have your little
miniature environment and all that set up
first and then you place them in and then...
Go get your insect from the fridge.
This is so interesting!
Regarding magnification, this is
the thing about the macros,
you want to get in closer and see more detail.
There's a lens you can buy, the
Canon MP-E 65mm, which gives 5x
magnification. But it is ridiculously
hard to use
and it's very expensive.
So reversal lens
technology, you know about extension tubes?
You know that it moves the lens away from the
camera so you get more magnification.
With extension tubes, you have 12mm, 25mm
and 36mm. So if you put a 25mm
extension tube on to, we'll say,
the Canon 100mm, that'll give you 20%
more magnification. The thing
about reverse lens is, you use your
extension tubes
and you mount the lens the wrong way
around on the camera. So the lens, we'll say
my specific setup would be a
a Canon 40mm f/2.8 STM lens.
You have to get various
adapters and rings to make
the connection with the camera but
when you put a lens on backwards, you're
losing all communication between the
lens and the camera because the connection points
are the opposite way around.
So say this is your lens, you
can buy, I think it's called, a Meike
Auto Focus extension tube.
What it does is,
they're like two little
extension tubes but they have a cable
going from one side to the other so it
feeds the information.
So the combination between that
little Meike Auto Focus
extension tube, the normal Kenko
extension tubes and this Canon 40mm
pancake lens, combination
probably about $250
and it'll give you 5x magnification.
You'll get a little bit of vignetting.
So when you're taking the photograph,
just leave a little bit of space
knowing that you're going to have to
crop in to it to get rid of that.
But that's a fairly decent workaround.
One of your pictures that I really
wanted to know more about was the
pink grasshopper picture. Will you tell me a
little bit more about that photograph and how
you got it? I know that's the one
that won the award, right?
That was last year, 2015, Sony World
Photography Awards. A friend of mine bought
a house down in Kilkenny, 11 acres and there was a
quarry on the 11 acres.
Now, when I say quarry,
you automatically think of
digging into the ground. This was
was a quarry that was a limestone hill,
about 30ft high.
When they started digging into this plateau,
they dug in the one-way. So what
you were left with then, was
a horseshoe shape hill
that's open in the middle.
In this little middle part, it's like
a little micro environment.
So I was down there
one day and I came across this pink
grasshopper.
Immediately I thought it was something
rare I rang up the Irish Wildlife to ask what
I'm after finding and they said it
is rare but it's not that rare.
Regarding meadow grasshoppers,
the pink colored one counts for about 1%.
You don't generally see them because
they don't generally get to adulthood.
Because they're pink, they stand out,
they are predated upon very quickly.
The pink pigment in the
skin come from a thing called
errythrism.
Errythrism is a gene mutation.
It is where you have an abnormal amount of red,
be it in your hair or your skin.
So people with red hair and
freckles it's kind of a form of errythrism.
Albino also, is kind of a form of errythrism.
So it was the whole story,
it wasn't just the photograph.
It was the the story behind the photograph.
It was a great photograph and you did well
capturing it, a microorganism in your
little world. That's brilliant!
Thanks so much for sharing that and all your
stories. I think I learned a lot
this episode.
Thanks Chris, thanks a million.
Thank you, Ruth.
Well that's all we have time for on this
show. If you'd like to brush up on your
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Thanks and I'll see you again soon.