Macro clarity - a tale of woe!

pg333

pg333

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Hi all - I'm still getting used to my new camera and have found an area where there are lots of lizards where I can most days guarantee a shot (or 100!).

The other day I managed to sneak up on them so well that I was amazed by the amount of experimentation I was able to do - changing lenses and settings, etc, managing by the end of it, to get the very best shots possible - or so I thought :(

Although I was reviewing as I went along, there's only so much you can do on the spot and when the subject is so relatively small that zooming into the detail on each shot and scrolling around rapidly eats into shooting time, so I experimented the best I could.

A few weeks back after taking some half-decent shots, I realised that it was time to invest in a UV filter as the white areas of detail were attracting a slight bit of chromatic abberation. So, fast forward to the other day with new filters on and a clean lens and a steady hand (even laying the camera down on the floor to take a hands-free steady shot), my pics were overwhelmingly disappointing.

So, its time I asked for some help - as I say, I've tried quite a few of the basic settings of my Nikon D90 - spot metering macro modes and 3D-metering, etc, yet the depth of focus on something as small as a 10cm lizard is very small (for an newbie like me, anyway).

The lighting the other day was cloudy and I set the WB to Cloudy accordingly, yet most of the pics came out rather blurry and although the general area was in focus, there seemed to be blurring in the focus even though I would say my hand was pretty steady (even tried some close-ups with the sport mode for fast ISO speeds).

All I'm looking for really is some guidance how to get the best out of my close-up shots (particularly for lizards) as the scope of focus is so small and the length of the body relatively long (long tails!), so, I end up getting half a face in focus or a section of the body, but never the whole lot.

Sorry for rambling - I hope I've made some sense - if not, just say so - some of the better [edited] pics I've put on my Flickr page in my sig below, but the problem is still visible in some of them (especially on the picture entitled Lizards).

Thanks for any help :)
 
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I think your main problem is depth of field. At close focussing distances you need a much narrower aperture to get a good depth of field. This is then going to give you problems with slow shutter speeds so you need to use a tripod, which is okay if the subject stays still long enough, or provide extra light using a flash. You can also improve things by upping the ISO. I'm not familiar with the D90 but I would have thought you could go to 800 without much noise.

When I'm shooting insect macros I use f/18 - f/22 to give me sufficient depth of field to get the full insect in focus. You won't need to go this narrow with a lizard as you'll be further away.
 
pg333 said:
I realised that it was time to invest in a UV filter as the white areas of detail were attracting a slight bit of chromatic abberation.
Click to expand...

Which a UV filter will do zero to remedy. Indeed, it'll probably make it worse.
 
OK, thank you very much for the help guys - I'm still very new to all of this and am so just trying to find my way to a better picture and you have given me some good pointers. Here's a few pictures to explain the type of thing I mean - the first pic is merely to show the scale of the lizards - very small and so, obviously the depth of field is the main concern when doing macro shots.

The pic with the two lizards at the time was meant as a focus on one face, but really, what I'd have preferred, would have been for both lizards to have been in focus, but the depth of field, I just could not work out (the autofocus picked out the face as I setup the shot). The pic quality other than that, I think is fine. The other single lizard pic shows the kind of horrors and frustrations of trying and trying again as I started off from afar with my 70-300mm Tamron macro lens, trying not to scare them off, so the clarity is due to the focal length being 185mm, I believe in that shot, but regardless of that, the shot just does not have the right spread of focus, which is what I am aiming for. The exif data should be in tact, all I have done is either resize or crop and save down to 75% jpeg to try and add it to the limits of the TP users gallery, but I have done no further editing.


For scale of the lizards:
DSC_4454resized.jpg


Happy enough with the clarity, but not the depth of field:
DSC_4505crop.jpg


Just terrible - clarity, depth of field, exposure, etc, etc!
DSC_4453crop.jpg



PS - about the UV filter and chromatic abberation problem - what would you suggest? - for example, I'd have to look it out, but a week or two ago, I took a similar macro of a lizard in the sun and the reflection off its scales were purple-fringed and although admittedly overcast on my shots above, the purple fringing is not a problem now I have the UV filters on - I've been led to believe by the weathermen that UV can actually be worse on overcast days.
 
pg333 said:
PS - about the UV filter and chromatic abberation problem - what would you suggest? - for example, I'd have to look it out, but a week or two ago, I took a similar macro of a lizard in the sun and the reflection off its scales were purple-fringed and although admittedly overcast on my shots above, the purple fringing is not a problem now I have the UV filters on - I've been led to believe by the weathermen that UV can actually be worse on overcast days.
Click to expand...

Purple fringing is nothing to do with UV. Your camera can't even 'see' UV because there's a filter in front of the sensor. Bright specular highlights will be very good at giving purple fringing and they're not going to be present on overcast days. That's why you saw a difference. A UV or so-called 'protective' filter cannot possibly improve the images from a DSLR. But they can degrade images.

UV isn't more intense on cloudy days. What the weatherman probably said was that UV intensity can still be high when there's thin cloud about, which can lead to people getting sunburn because it's not sunny and they don't use protection.
 
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Ok, thanks, Frank, you are probably right there - I think the bit about sunburn is what I was thinking about. But what about any suggestions - how does one go about reducing purple fringing in dslrs - is there anything one can do to lessen or reduce it by way of settings or other types of filters?
 
Purple fringing - or Chromatic Aberration to give it its proper name is not a problem of DSLRs but of lenses.

You can get rid of some of the CA in post processing but I'm afraid the only real answer if you want to do a lot of macro work is to buy a proper macro lens.

.
 
I have to echo the last comment about a macro lens. I tried with other lenses and got so frustrated until I bought a 100mm macro lens which was rarely off my camera all summer. Now I am delighted with many more of the pictures I have kept (love to be happy with all but have to leave some learning to do)
 
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