The Penguin and the frogs in the Zen Garden

Penguin and Frogs in the Zen Garden

One day a couple weeks ago I decided to work on my still photography and try out some set ups and macro shots. Since I was having a good light form the window, I decided to use the natural light instead of my light box. My setup was pretty simple. I used my 35 mm prime lens, my mini-Manfrotto tripod, a box (to put the subject on), and a black cloth under the subject. My subject was an oak leaf with red cone galls, which are caused by Red Cone Gall Wasps (Andricus kingi), cynipid wasps. These galls are about ½ cm high.

Since I do not have a macro lens, I used the Xit XTETN Auto Focus Macro Extension Tube Set designed for Nikon DSLRs. It costs a whole lot less than a macro lens (around 40 bucks) and it is much lighter to carry.

Using the 20mm extension ring (the intermediate one) and the subject about 2 ½ inches from the lens, I took a series of photos with different apertures (f/14-18), in spot metering, limiting the ISO to 200, which gave me a shutter speed of 1 to ½ s. I also used manual focus. Remember that I was working under natural light and today there are clouds out there, therefore the amount of light I was getting was not constant. This accounts for the variation in shutter speed.

I was quite pleased with the results at f/16. Note in the picture below that there are only three cones in reasonable focus, they are about 1 cm apart max. and no change in aperture would bring one more in focus under these conditions. The photo below is the jpeg preview generated by my camera:

jpeg preview
35 mm prime lens w/ 20 mm extension tube
ISO 200, f/16, 1.0

After processing the raw file in Adobe Elements 9, the final picture is below.

Final version
35 mm prime lens with 20 mm extension tube
ISO 200, f/16, 1.0

To achieve this result, I cropped a little, and since there was no noise, I was able to sharpen quite some to enhance the appearance of the cones that were in focus. I also used the clone tamp tool to fill in the black space of the right hand corner, which in the jpeg picture had the pattern of the cloth in focus, and cleaned the dirt behind the two cones in the center, which was adding some confusion to the picture. The adjustments to the raw are in the two snapshots below:

And finally, to close the section, I took a snapshot of the Penguin and the Frogs in the Zen Garden. Remember, before doing macros shots and product pictures, clean your subjects off dust...