Mid summer 2020. We've been in lockdown/shielding for several months now. The tiny flies have turned up as usual on our minuscule excuse for a pond. As usual I try to photograph them. As usual I fail.
These tiny flies are hyper-active. They usually don't stay in one place for more than a very few seconds. They land in different places on the lily pads so I can't simply set up the focus for one place and wait for one to turn up.
I need to be quick to frame them, gain focus and shoot before they fly off. But at higher magnifications it is difficult to point the camera in exactly the right direction so a tiny subject is in the frame. You can sometimes spend a long time just trying to get subject to show up in the frame. It can be very frustrating. Also, with the strong close-up lenses you need to get enough magnification for these tiny subjects, the working distance has to be just right, within very few millimetres, otherwise autofocus won't engage.
It is difficult doing all this fast - working distance, frame, focus, shoot - and in this case needing the camera low to get a nice angle on them, with the camera almost touching the water, fingers dipping into the water sometimes. The bright light doesn't help either, even though I'm using an LCD hood (couldn't use the viewfinder for these even if I wanted to because of the angles involved).
So, lots of "missed it, again".
But a few work. That's good. Apparently. But when I come to look at them on the PC it is the usual story. Nothing I'd really want to use.
One of the things I have learnt over the years is that some techniques seem impossible to me when I first try them, but as I practice it can get easier, eventually becoming sufficiently routine for me to wonder what the problem was.
So, lack of practice, lack of appropriate muscle memory, perhaps that was the problem. Having to think explicitly about sequencing the actions, hesitating while thinking what to do next, rather than going through the sequence of actions smoothly from one to the next, fitting it all together into a confident, smooth, seamless, fast and accurate performance.
So I decided to get serious about it. Rather than moaning about how difficult it all was I would practice, practice, practice. I would achieve that smooth performance, I would succeed with this. I could do it.
I spent several days on it, not worrying that it wasn't working yet. I would get that breakthrough moment when it all fell into place. Then it would be ok.
It eventually dawned on me that I was kidding myself. The images simply didn't have enough depth of field for me to want to use them. It wasn't just that it was difficult to get the plane of focus in the right place, I could live with that. Have lots of attempts and pick out the few that work. I've done that before. However, as I looked through the best of my attempts it became clear that even when the focus plane was ideally placed there simply wasn't enough depth of field. And nothing I could do by way of better execution was going to alter that.
I had to admit it to myself; I had failed. I wasn't going to succeed with these tiny flies.
And then a little thought in the back of my mind - "not with this kit you're not going to succeed". Hmmmm.....
So if close-up lenses were not going to work, was there something else that might? Something in the macro lens, extension tube etc area? Given my prior experience I couldn't see why anything like that would work. But it would be nice to get a bit of hands-on practice with some of the kit I had accumulated and never really used. Even if it wasn't going to work for these tiny flies I might learn something of interest. And the flies would probably be there for a few more days to give me some small subjects to practice on.
I first tried a Laowa 25mm macro lens on my Sony A7ii. To my surprise I quite quickly got some results that were better than I had ever achieved with my close-up lens setups. This was the image that sticks in my mind as making me think it would be worth pursing these alternative approaches.
And there were others Here are two from the same day, one of a slightly larger subject just two minutes after the one above, the other of a much larger subject later in the day, but in both cases closer in on the subject with the subject filling more of the frame with greater depth of field than I think I had ever previously achieved.
I didn't like the way the setup handled, but that was beside the point. These images showed that with this sort of setup I could get results that I liked which I couldn't get with my close-up lens setups.
My motivation skyrocketed.
That was at the beginning of June 2020. It was the start of 7 months of fairly intensive experimentation and testing.
No comments:
Post a Comment