By October 2007 I had discovered the Raynox 150, which I think was not as well known then as it is now. It is less powerful than the Raynox 250 and is much easier to use. Used with the S3is it covers scenes from around 75 mm wide to around 17 mm wide, with a longer working distance of a little over 200mm. That range of scene size was more suitable for the mainly medium sized invertebrates I was photographing, with the subject rarely filling the frame. You can also gain focus over a wider range of working distances than with the Raynox 250, which makes focusing easier. And the working distance is longer, which is good when photographing invertebrates which can be a bit jumpy about you getting too near to them. Had I known about it I would have done well to start with the Raynox 150.
One problem I had with invertebrates was that the S3is does not have a hot shoe. At that time I had not discovered the work and techniques of Mark Berkery. I later found out that Mark produced wonderful images of invertebrates using a bridge camera similar to mine (in his case a Panasonic FZ50), with the same close-up lenses. But he used flash a lot of the time, and he used the camera’s built in flash, directing the light to the subject using a snoot. You can see Mark’s snoot arrangement by searching for “Velcro” on the linked page. I tried a couple of methods of diffusing the camera’s built in flash, but with no success, so all the time I used the S3is I used available light. This had two consequences for invertebrates: images that were often not very sharp or detailed; and nasty highlights when working in bright, direct sunlight.
For invertebrates I quickly took to using minimum aperture so as to get as much depth of field as I could. This is controversial. Using such small apertures is widely regarded as unsuitable for the very logical reason that when using very small apertures images lose a lot of sharpness/detail because of diffraction. However, I see it as a trade-off between one sort of sharpness/detail and another. You can either have a relatively thin slice of the subject in focus with fine detail showing, or you can have a deeper slice of the subject in focus with less fine detail but more larger scale detail. My preference is for a deeper slice. I’ll come back to this another time, but here I’ll simply note that using small apertures means that you need more light and/or longer exposures and/or higher ISOs.
Unfortunately, the light levels are often quite low here. In addition, it is a notoriously breezy location. And insects move around, and sometimes you have no choice but to photograph them when they are in motion, or some of their parts such as antennae are moving around. As I didn’t manage to add more light to the scene using flash I ended up using exposures that were too long or ISOs that were too high to get good sharpness/detail. You can improve matters somewhat with good post processing, but I was a beginner at post processing at that time and did not have tools as powerful as I now have to hand.
So the lack of flash gave me problems when I didn’t have enough light. Paradoxically it sometimes gave me problems in bright sunlight too. I find that with invertebrates bright sunlight can produce very high contrast and give images a rather ugly look. Using flash can even out the illumination giving, to my eye, a much more pleasing look.
Still, when the circumstances were more or less suitable I did get some results that I still quite like. Yes, I could do better now in terms of image quality, with better tools and more experience, but there is more to images than image quality. These are of their time, of that time in my life. For me, they are memories, as well as pictures. Here are some that caught my eye.
(By the way, you will notice that few of the animals and plants I post are identified. That is because I have a life-long memory retention and recall problem. I can’t, by and large, recall names, of animals, plants, people, celebrities, football teams, anything … And if I do try, I often get it wrong. So, for the most part, I don’t.)
Click on an image to see a larger version
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