Crane Fly

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scitch
Posts: 463
Joined: Sat May 29, 2010 12:35 am

Crane Fly

Post by scitch »

Here's a crane fly with a 4X Chinese Plan objective at the end of a tube. The lighting was with a diffused external flash, onboard flash with a snoot, and tissue paper all around. Sony A200 camera, ISO 400, 1 second, 75 frames PMax in Zerene. Post processing included retouching to remove a dust streak, exposure adjustment on RAW images, auto tone, crop, and shrink to 800 px in PS CS5.

Below that is an experiment that I did. I also like to take photos of birds (bald eagles, hawks, hummingbirds, etc.) so I have a telephoto lens that is called a tele-macro lens. So, I thought I'd do a macro experiment with it. This image is a stack of 3 images taken in my yard before the crane fly ended up in the freezer. It was taken on a monopod, 3 images from about 4 feet away. Not so great, probably won't do that again.

Image

Image

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Hhmm, I must have overlooked this one earlier.

The 4X objective looks good. That upper left corner would be a good place to see CA, and there isn't any. Resolution I can't really tell at this scale, except to note that it seems to be the same at center and corner. That's a good sign.

One comment about the lighting... I see "external flash, onboard flash...1 second". It's generally not a good idea to combine flash and long exposure times. What happens is that the flash generates the actual image in the first millisecond or so, and then the rest of the time just lets noise accumulate. You may get a significantly quieter image by reducing your exposure time to 1/200 second or so -- just enough to capture all the light from both the main and slave flashes.

--Rik

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