| Butterflies To Scale: At 4X, this image of a small section of a butterfly wing reveals the fascinating contours of its scales and vein structure. For Lepp, butterfly studies are complex studio subjects perfect for snowy days. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon MP-E 65mm ƒ/2.8 1-5x macro lens at 4X and MT-24EX macro flash,12 stacked images at ƒ/4 captured with a StackShot |
Fierce winter weather may interrupt your outdoor photography adventures, but it doesn't mean you have to stop shooting. Actually, it's a great time to take a step back from the cacophony of subjects competing for attention. These are the months I enjoy working in my studio and taking the time to fully explore all aspects and approaches to a single subject, while developing and mastering new capture and postprocessing techniques. Here are a few ideas.
Scaling New Heights With Butterfly Subjects
Butterflies are great to watch flitting among the blossoms, and occasionally we even capture them in the act of landing or nectaring on a flower. But butterflies have a closer beauty found in the designs, colors and textures that make up their wings. Capturing these features requires some real macro techniques and high-quality specimens that were raised for viewing and photography. You need to get to a magnification of 3X or more to do them justice. If you have the Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens, you're set to go. With an APS-C sensor, this lens will achieve an effective magnification of 1.6X to 8X. Everyone else will have to use some ingenuity to get beyond the common 1X that most macro lenses offer.
Take a 200mm lens (it can be a 70-200mm zoom or a 180mm macro) and a wide-angle lens, such as a 24mm; reverse the wide-angle and place it front element to front element with the 200mm, which is mounted to the camera. You can purchase an inexpensive reversing ring from B&H, Adorama and Amazon, among others, which has the filter size for each lens on the intermediate ring. If you're in a hurry, or don't want to spend the money, take wide black tape (from the hardware store) and use the tape to carefully mate the lenses front to front. You'll achieve a magnification equivalent to the focal length of the telephoto divided by the focal length of the wide angle. For example, the combination of the 24mm and 200mm lenses will yield approximately 8X of surprising quality. Note that the front lens will work only manually, and settings need to be accomplished with the 200mm attached to the camera.
Extension tubes also can help in attaining higher magnification. Inserted between the body and the lens, extension tubes increase magnification at a 1:1 ratio; a 50mm lens needs 50mm of extension to achieve 1X; a 24mm lens needs 24mm of extension for that same 1X. Another great option is your 2X tele-extender. It doubles the magnification with a two-stop light loss, but still gives excellent image quality.
You'll need flash! A lot of light is lost with higher magnification, so bring the flashes in close and either use your TTL flash setting or monitor a manual exposure on the camera's LCD and histogram. It's so much easier than film days, when you had to wait a couple of days to see if the exposure was correct.
Now you can practice your stacking skills. Stacking extends depth of field by combining a number of captures at different focus points into a single image. At higher magnifications, depth of field is minimal. Any image beyond 1X will need to be stacked to have a reasonable range of sharpness. To accomplish the captures, move through the image with very small adjustment of the focusing ring or, alternatively, slight movements of the camera using a focusing rail. A tripod or copy stand will hold the camera very still. You might look into the CamRanger; when used with an iPad or other tablet, it can be set to accomplish stacking and gives you a very large viewfinder (www.camranger.com). Once you get going on this technique, it will keep you busy all winter.
