Aligning camera: I miss a lot because it's hard to focus in on what you see. Often I find myself misfocusing, ie the focus is at x but the bug is actually 3 darn cm to the left. This can waste me up to 20s if I have to retry a few times. I think I need to construct some sort of guide to help me. Anyone else do this? Having to keep the lens at f/5.6 or f/8 doesn't really help with this and I've started to chat to a company that can help me construct a device that will let me focus in wide open but stop down the reversed lens for the photo as I press the shutter. Might be interesting.
Perspective: the few bugs I can manage to find usually have their back towards me. As interesting as that might be (I've got some splendid shots of aphid cornicles), the bum of a bug doesn't really engage me visually or personally
Perspective2: backgrounds and light do funny things when they're out of focus like these are. I havent really learned to see and judge what they'll look like yet. Are there any recommended books people have seen a good discussion of macro backgrounds at? I do wonder whether instead of looking for the bug and hoping to make an interesting background I should try looking for an aesthetic background in the garden and wait for a bug to come along.
Time: practice makes perfect, but like all of you this is just a hobby in my spare time, and with family, chores, work etc I just have a couple of hrs per week to practice. Our house is small so I just don't have the room to set up a tabletop thing that I can leave and resume whenever. Having had enough of rowing with the wife because she wants me to bath the kids rather than me going outside for 30 mins whilst there's still some light, I've resorted to going out with a torch in one hand and cam in the other once everyone else is in bed. Tricky.
Mobility: when my setup was on a flash bracket I found that the diffuser often got in the way and disturbed the branches the bugs were sitting on. Since my bracket broke I put my flash on top, after sacrificing diffuserV2 to make a diffuserV4, which fits on top, it's a real help
Lens: bugs come in all shapes and sizes and keeping the el-nikkor 50 on means a FoV too small for anything larger than about 5mm or so. Mounting a lens on a zoom doesn't seem to work. Pentax don't have an MPE-65. Think I'm stuffed on this one and I'm looking at changing lenses quite a bit.
Bugs: the variety in my garden isn't the greatest, or maybe they're there but I can't find them
. I've tried posting on various forums for some tips, but are there any books or sites that you folks use that tell you where and when to find things?DoF: my experimentation is all very limted DoF and I think the next thing to start playing with might be Zerene to bring some more variety to my stuff.
Taken at night, ok, but in retrospect would have been nicer to get the whole claw(?) in focus rather than just the top.
The orange thing coming in from the top right is distracting, should have cloned that out. Otherwise nothing special really.
More DoF would have been nice.
