New to macro photography....

[Chris Wolfgram]

I hope my subject isn't too cliche' I was using my Canon R7, and a rented RF 100mm F2.8 Macro, + two 35mm extension tubes (which I bought to use on my long birding lenses) Even among Jumping Spiders, this was a really little guy. But I was able to get full frame shots of him. In fact, with a few, I got too close, as to not leave enough breathing room for an aesthetic shot, so I just painted in some more real-estate Pretty cool when you can make a 40mp original, with a 32mp camera Over on the soon to be gone DPR macro forum, I was told that this 1.4 mag lens, on my 1.6 crop camera, with the two extension tubes, was giving me 3.3 X's magnification. Seems about right to me.
Now, TBH, I went into this whole macro thing, thinking I wanted to stack as many shots (im using Helicon Focus) as I could, to make every darn thing in my frame tack sharp ! (I mean, maybe not the other side of the kitchen lol .... but at least the back side of my subjects perch.... and I semi-achieved that.... Except, I had some weird little cloudy halos around my subject, which looked really bad. So, I started going back through my stacks of 60-200 images, and choosing "only" the shots which I needed for most of my subject to be sharp, which turned out to be anywhere from 28 to maybe 50 shots.
Anyway, often I see folks say, "I'm new, so please be easy on me"...... But TBH, "Because I'm new, you can be as rough as you want to, and its not going to hurt my feelings" I mean, being a newbie to macro, I have the best excuse lol
Oh, and also I wanted to say, with my birding shots, I have gotten to a point where "IF" I have to use Topaz, I kind of consider it a personal fail, as 95% of my shots don't need any sharpening, or noise removal, unless I mess something up..... But these ALL needed Topaz Is my kitchen counter not solid enough ? Or is it that with 70mm of extension tubes, my setup was really back heavy, and pretty springy...















Oh and I had to return my rental lens yesterday ....but still have some other shots to post and discuss.... Then I'll probably just be lurking for a while until I buy that RF 100 macro
A lot of freaking AMAZING shots posted on this forum ! I have a LOT to learn for sure.

[J_Rogers]

Welcome to the forum!

Your images are pretty dang good for an absolute beginner. Some of the halos, or fringing, I believe you are talking about are pretty common in stacks of insects / or deep stacks with a large DOF. Zerene seems to do a much better job compared to Helicon in managing those, as well as being able to implement a technique called "slabbing" which can further eliminate some oddities. Otherwise, you didn't mention what you are using to move either the camera or subject, and that is likely the other factor in creating the halos.

Also why hold out on macro photography just because of a Canon lens? There are a multitude of options for that magnification range at 1/10 the cost.

[Chris Wolfgram]

Thank you J_Rogers I will definitely check out Zerene then too. Oh. my camera, with a lens like the RF 100 macro, that has Auto Focus, does "in-camera" stacks.... which although they come out as a JPG (scoff lol) are a good way to quickly see which stacks might be worth fully processing as a DNG, then saved as a TIF. That said, I didn't have to move the camera, or the subject. My combo did that for me
I'd LOVE to have a 2.5 to 5 X's magnification lens, but to be able to do automatic, in-camera stacks, the lens needs to have AF, and the Canon 1.4 X's is the best I've seen....

[rjlittlefield]

Chris, welcome aboard -- I'm delighted to see that we finally got the forum software to register you properly!

Regarding magnification, at this forum it is traditional to write in terms of optical magnification, not including any crop factor. In your case that would be the 1.4X from the lens, plus whatever was added by the extension tubes. If we assume that the "3.3X" fellow gave a number that included the 1.6 crop factor, then the optical magnification would be 3.3/1.6, roughly 2X. That number is important because it appears in assorted formulas you may need at some point.

Regarding the need for Topaz, one peculiarity of macro shooting is that we are almost always operating in a regime where there is a lot of diffraction blur. On Canon cameras, a good rule of thumb is that the effective f# is about equal to the nominal f# multiplied by the quantity (optical magnification + 1). I see at Flickr that you were shooting at nominal f/5.6. But taking into account the effect of magnification, that turns into effective f/17 (5.6*(2+1)=16.8 ). f/17 is significantly into diffraction territory on an APS-C camera with 32+ megapixels, and that's why you should not feel bad about using heavy sharpening in post-processing.

Regarding halos in stacking, those occur frequently. There are several different causes. Sometimes halos are unavoidable, for the reasons discussed at viewtopic.php?p=102557#102557 . Other times they are largely avoidable by one technique or another. If you show examples of what you're still having trouble with, we may be able to suggest workarounds. (I'm the fellow who wrote Zerene Stacker and I answer all the support emails, so I've seen a lot of different halos over the years.)

--Rik

[Chris Wolfgram]

TYSM Rick, for your patience I don’t know what the heck all that was about… except to say, it was most likely me clicking something stupid lol
Anyway, so I should not include the crop factor….
2 X’s then ? I’m sure your right, but I’m really kind of surprised then, how much 2 X’s can do ! Tomorrow when I’m back at my PC, I’ll post another shot of an Aphid (albeit with wings that were bigger than it was) but it filled the frame !
And yes, I will post a shot that shows those funky halos (that I tried so hard to hide) easily.
Wow ! F17 equivalent !
I actually tried shooting a couple stacks at F2.8, but for whatever reason (maybe you know ?) those completely failed ? I figured maybe it would just take more shots to ge the same DOF, but nope. It came up as just a pure blur ?
Thanks again, I’m going to keep,scrolling back for more inspiration

[MarkSturtevant]

Very good work there, and it's impressive to get so many focus bracketed frames on a live jumping spider, even if it is done with blazing speed from that fancy camera.
One thing to work on is diffusion from the flash. It's a peculiar goal in the hobby to have large highlights on the eyes that still show background color. There are different ways to do that, and it can easily become the one last thing you need to improve. I know from experience.

[Chris Wolfgram]

Sorry I just saw this. TY But actually, no flash. I was using continuous LED lighting. My camera won't do in-camera focus bracketing with flash Which btw, I did, and will continue to do my own focus bracketing with TIF or DNG files, it's just great that camera makes its own JPG, which gives me a really good idea, of which sets are worth putting in the time to fully process.
BTW, since I returned that lens, I've found Jumping spiders which were WAAY bigger than that little guy... Seriously like 500% bigger !
Plus I've found 3 different species ! If I get the lens, I think I'll set up a little sectioned tank to keep 4 or 5 of them as pets. Then I can have as many 1-2 hr sessions with them as I want..
Experimenting with different settings, lighting, etc.

I have to believe it would be a lot easier to get a really clean, closer to perfect shot, if the spider were big enough, that I was able to back off a little bit, maybe not even having to use extension tubes
Does this sound correct ?

[Chris Wolfgram]

Sorry I just saw this. TY But actually, no flash. I was using continuous LED lighting. My camera won't do in-camera focus bracketing with flash Which btw, I did, and will continue to do my own focus bracketing with TIF or DNG files, it's just great that camera makes its own JPG, which gives me a really good idea, of which sets are worth putting in the time to fully process.
BTW, since I returned that lens, I've found Jumping spiders which were WAAY bigger than that little guy... Seriously like 500% bigger !
Plus I've found 3 different species ! If I get the lens, I think I'll set up a little sectioned tank to keep 4 or 5 of them as pets. Then I can have as many 1-2 hr sessions with them as I want..
Experimenting with different settings, lighting, etc.

I have to believe it would be a lot easier to get a really clean, closer to perfect shot, if the spider were big enough, that I was able to back off a little bit, maybe not even having to use extension tubes
Does this sound correct ?

[MarkSturtevant]

That seems a good plan. Photographing these spiders in a staged setting can get much improved results. Of course you used continual lighting! (doh!!).