My take on Macro Photography

Jumping Spiders are my favorite :D SX50 HS with
Raynox DCR - 250

I must admit that there are times when you just run out of birds to shoot. There are days where the birds are just not quite into getting themselves photographed :D It's either you couldn't get close or you ended up somewhere where they are too scarce. I usually just drive around my island. I've been to a lot of access roads that are not frequently traveled in the hopes of finding birding spots. I usually travel alone in my trusty xrm 125. So I'm usually either parked by the side of the road or moving on slow and stopping when I find or hear something. I do venture out into some places every now and then leaving my bike behind - where its safe to leave it behind. Usually its somewhere I frequent and people are already familiar with me and me with them. As I've mentioned, there have been a lot of times when I don't find anything to shoot, until this one time when I decided - why not shoot flowers and insects? They're beautiful too! And the next thing that came in mind was Macro photography. So I got more curious about it and looked it up - How do I  get up close and how do I increase the magnification? What do I need to get for my SX50 (which was my only camera that time) to achieve macro shots?

This spider was about 3mm.

Googling got me into a lot of articles and found out that there was only one option for me to do macro with my SX50 - get a macro filter/diopter. I bought me a Raynox DCR-250. It is a snap on macro lens that allows you to get high magnification. Couple it with a 1200mm telephoto and a x2 digital teleconverter and you will be speechless...well not really...since when I tried it the first time I was cursing half the time and wowing and chimping on my lcd screen. It was so much fun I almost forgot about the birds.

I learned a lot from that experience and played around a bit to get myself more acquainted. First thing I realized was that the focusing was fixed. You yourself have to move. Also I had to hold my breath most of the time just to take a photo since all that high magnification also magnified the shake. Two, depth of field was really narrow. I could only go as far as F8. Three, you have to take a lot of shots. Trust me, you don't want to go home only to find out that most of your shots were really out of focus. It's better to have taken too many than to have taken too few and not one was in focus. Four, a tripod is useful for stationary subjects but if you're out there going for insects, a tripod will only be in the way. By the time you're done moving your tripod to get within focusing distance your subject won't be there. Mind you just a little bit of movement can already affect the focusing. So if you have your camera on a tripod, and you're trying to photograph a jumping spider - Good luck!

My SX50 HS with Raynox DCR 250 and DIY macro flash diffuser

As for lighting, well, natural light is still good. But using flash does make your photos look better - ea. Catchlight. I had to come up with my own DIY flash diffuser. And I came up with one made primarily from a plastic bottle and added in a plastic tab from a cotton swab container which I cut in a way where one end inserts into the hotshoe and the other has one end of a toothpaste tube cap glued to it. More about it on the next post.

Like I said - there was a point where I almost forgot about the birds. I was no longer giving them much attention as I used to since I was usually looking down looking for jumping spiders and other insects. It is a world of unseen beauty right under our noses, and I almost wanted to do Macro photography full time. Primarily because it was convenient - I didn't have to go far to find my subjects :D This was the start of me venturing more into photography.