Shallow Friendships?

[Harold Gough]

When I returned to serious photography in 2001, after doing very little for several years, I noted one new trend. Many serious amateurs, according to their images and their captions, published in hobby magazines, were somewhat obsessed with macro at maximum aperture, with fast lenses, such that depth of field scarcely existed.

Six years later, I came across stacking, made possible by the emergence of digital technology.

I can't help wondering whether the two 'schools' have remained separate, possibly with hate mail passing between. Or have some been converted or reconciled? Might there even be mixed marriages and, if so, what kind of photographers might their children be?

Harold

[Ken Ramos]

Some good questions posed there Harold. Personally I do not care for stacking when it comes to photography as an art. Good old fashioned depth of field I think, helps to express more of what the photographer is trying to convey. Of course that is just my opinion. In scientific applications though, I believe that stacking has a great future. I too returned to photography around 2001 after having been away for a good many years. Being in the service at the time, I had little time or place to set up a darkroom for 35mm and larger format printing, though color slides were managable, depending on where I was, at the time.

As for hate mail and poison darts, I have not noticed any but then I stick pretty close to myself and what works or satisfies my needs and let others hash out their differences without my input. Yeah, I am one of the silent majority. As for what type or kind of photographers their children may be, well I could not say there either but sometimes they, the children, often go in a direction 180 degrees from what we might would expect. My stepson is a good example. Started out a very successful businessman and then before I knew it, he had gone back to school, furthering his education and is now is in bio-research growing human body parts and stuff.

[Mike B in OKlahoma]

Naturally those of us of the true faith of stackdom justifiably despise the devil-spawned shallow DOF heretics, may all their photos be overexposed! Okay, just kidding!

There are different cars for different purposes. Some people like hot sports cars that bottom out on a road that hasn't been repaved in the last six months. Some people like rugged off-road vehicles that can't run fast. Some people like both of them, switching to the best vehicle for whatever purpose they're trying to accomplish at the time. Those who prefer one or the other will probably get slightly better at their specialty than the "do-it-all" types, both because they get more practice in their specialty, and perhaps because they do feel more zealous and driven about it than practical. If someone is zealous about their specialty, I suppose in theory they might openly look down on, and even make snide remarks about zealots of a different school. I'm sure it happens on the internet, which sometimes seems custom-designed to maximize opportunities for conflict over minor points! But the same sort of effect takes place in photography.

As for myself, I'm not really in either of the two schools you've mentioned. My favored subjects are live moving ones doing their thing in as natural a setting as I can arrange (with some of my favored subjects, especially reptiles, a truly natural setting is difficult or impossible). So I am not primarily a stacker, but I also view not-enough DOF as the enemy most of the time, and wish I could have more DOF! But I have done some stacking, and it works quite well for static snakes, for instance, and I've even done my fair share of artsy shallow DOF shots, though a few years ago I'd have giggled at the notion of me as an artist.

In any case, I shoot the majority of my macro shots with a single frame stopped down a lot. But I'll switch to the other two "schools" when they are better for my purpose. Wishy-washy, aren't I?

[DaveW]

Just had to tell somebody on a conventional photography site that you cannot automatically transfer conventional photography aperture techniques over to macro photography due to minimal DOF. He was deliberately shooting with a macro lens at f2.8 in order to blur the background in a 1:2 magnification shot of a spider. He would only have 0.017 of an inch DOF according to tables at f2.8 and 0.19 of an inch at f32 anyway.

See:-

http://www.btinternet.com/~g.a.patterso ... -10_1.html

DaveW

[puzzledpaul]

Wonder how a 'serious amateur' is defined these days?

(other than someone who never smiles because of the frequent credit card statements associated with eqt 'updates' )

pp

[Danny]

Very interesting and yes I hang out on quite a few nature macro forums and there are two schools of thought on it.

Personally I love to see both. I know 5 photographers that I would call, macro artists due to what they do and show with extremely shallow DOF. Then I also know ........... many that I would term as macro artists that work in the dead opposite direction that maximise DOF.

Never seen any debates or arguments between the two. They do stand together and I love to see both and a good mix of each.

Must remember that not only in macro but in all fields, no one is right or wrong...........just different.

All the best folks.

Danny.

[Harold Gough]

Just had to tell somebody on a conventional photography site that you cannot automatically transfer conventional photography aperture techniques over to macro photography due to minimal DOF. He was deliberately shooting with a macro lens at f2.8 in order to blur the background in a 1:2 magnification shot of a spider. He would only have 0.017 of an inch DOF according to tables at f2.8 and 0.19 of an inch at f32 anyway.

See:-

http://www.btinternet.com/~g.a.patterso ... -10_1.html

DaveW

You also have to abandon the inverse square law for light intensity/distance from articial light sources, if calculating, when they are very close to the subject. It is generally a linear relationship.

Harold

[Harold Gough]

I suppose that, in a quest for some kind of reality, the stackers could individually adjust softness of focus in the frames comprising the more 'distant' parts of the image, to give something approaching, or even qualitatively different from, a film image.

Those who hold beliefs about the 'truth' of an image captured on film might suggest that many fibs add up to one lie!

Harold

[Charles Krebs]

Two different techniques. Not mutually exclusive at all! It all depends on what you are trying to convey. One of the finest photographers of "selective focus" was the late Mary Ellen Schultz. (She was also one of the finest people I've known!) We taught many workshops together in the 90's, and she was certainly "responsible" for introducing this technique to many people. Some even rubbed off on me ... Here are a couple images I posted in the "old" forum:







As to stacking...

Good old fashioned depth of field I think, helps to express more of what the photographer is trying to convey.

Those who hold beliefs about the 'truth' of an image captured on film might suggest that many fibs add up to one lie!

I might suggest that when you reach a certain magnifications it may be impossible to show what you wish to convey in a single image. Sort of like trying to understand the entire "picture" of a 1000 piece jig-saw puzzle by examining a single piece.

Or think of trying to verbally describe a complicated animal (to someone who has never seen it before) with a single five word sentence. The sentence you use is not a "fib", but cannot come even close to an adequate description. Your single sentence simply cannot include adequate information! But when you put together many of these true sentences, you can produce a much more complete, enlightening description that really allows the other individual to clearly understand the subject.

Below we have one image from a "z-stack" of a blow-fly. Directly below that is the completed stacked image. If my goal is to "describe" to the viewer the appearance of a blow-fly head I would say that the first image below fails miserably, while the second is quite successful in doing this.

[rjlittlefield]

Nicely said, Charles, and beautifully illustrated. (As usual. )

--Rik

[Danny]

Superb examples Charlie, darn impressive stuff.

Heres the clincher though, which one would your wife, interior designer, etc, want on the walls in a lounge ??.

This is where even with floral subjects, that the soft colours and soft sharpness with sharp selective focus come into their own. I know one that exhibits in Paris full time, Sophie that works exactly along the soft lines. Another photographer, Michael Brown that deals with interior designers using the selective focus and soft colours in flora. How many do I know that sell professionally extremely sharp, detailed full DOF shots for a living. Ahhh not many, if any.

So there is a need for both styles and both are great to view.

All the best and well shown Charles, fantastic examples.

Danny.

[Danny]

Where are we, lets have a look

Enter the world of Sophie

http://prismes.free.fr/

http://prismes.free.fr/news.htm

http://prismes.free.fr/macro1.htm

Enter the world of Michael Brown

http://macroartinnature.wordpress.com/2006/10/

Just one very small sample of Michael's work, his blog is huge and well worth going through.

Sophie is in a world of her own. Just awesome soft work.

So thats two I would consider macro artists and I don't use that term very easily. I'm picky on what I consider art in the terms of photography.

All the best and sit down with a coffee and go through those sites, we may all learn something.

Danny.

[rjlittlefield]

Lovely stuff, no doubt.

As to what a designer would want on a wall, I suspect that depends on which designer and what wall.

I've seen an awful lot of Ansel Adams prints on walls, and nary a one of them was blurred.

But of course we're used to everything looking sharp when we see a landscape, and we're used to limited DOF when we're looking at small things. That's actually one of the clues that we use to decide how big something is. If it's all sharp, it looks big; if some of it is blurred, it looks small.

So I can't help wondering how much of what we like is largely a matter of what we're used to.

BTW, what I'm talking about here is treatment of the subject itself. Isolating a subject by deliberately blurring the background is almost always a good thing, no matter what magnification range we're talking about.

Which of course opens the question, what's the subject? When I look at Michael Brown's page, as it sits on this day, the image that I'm most drawn to is the one with pink feathers filling the frame, tack sharp and promising more and more detail if only I could zoom in. I'm disappointed that I can't.

Maybe that's the thing. I'm a detail junkie. It's great to get the artistic effect at first impression, but if the image stops there, I get bored. What I want on my walls -- in fact what I have on my walls -- are large-format stitched landscapes and high resolution stacked macros. Boredom is not a problem. There's always something more to see.

But is tack-sharp and packed with detail suitable for a lounge? Probably not -- I imagine that the very last behavior a designer would want in a lounge is to have people studying the artwork. Far better to have them get that rush of gestalt good vibes, and then move on to other things.

Different tools for different goals.

--Rik

[Danny]

LOL, interesting Rik. I've had to deal with interior designers due to what I did, not one of them would think of putting a fly on any wall I know of, no matter how good it was. A company making fly spray, well there ya go, even then they probably want the flower first .

Think about the walls we see everyday, flowers, landscapes, sunsets, animals, etc, but I've never seen a highly detailed fly. I don't think its just a me thing either. I can just hear Jan now, "That is not going on the wall............full stop !!!"

Danny.

[Mike B in OKlahoma]

Maybe that's the thing. I'm a detail junkie. It's great to get the artistic effect at first impression, but if the image stops there, I get bored.

I also am, and have always been, a detail junkie. A few years ago, I found a cache of pictures I'd drawn for school in 3rd grade (about 40 years ago!). They were not well-designed pictures, but there were absolute SWAMRMS of details in them, in fact, one of the problems with them is that they are so busy with no clear center of interest. On seeing these again, my mother commented that my third grade teacher had told her one of the distinctive things about my drawings was the huge number of interesting things I'd put in them. Of course, I couldn't draw worth beans then, and I still can't now! But the details are there, however inexpertly rendered.