Camera Labs

Hi everyone,

I have now posted the macro-mosaics of the Butterflies and Moth so far taken on my Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/page1/

As this gives up to 5 Meg per image (free) this is pretty good IMO.

All the best,
Greg

_________________
Nexstar 11 GPS, 2 x Sky 90, M25C, MaximDL, Photshop CS3, Noel Carboni's Photoshop actions, 7 foot Pulsar fibreglass dome, Canon 40D, 100mm macro lens, 28-200mm zoom lens, 17-55mm f#2.8 zoom lens, 100-400mm zoom lens, 1.4x converter, 2x converter.
http://www.newforestobservatory.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/

Really nice shots Greg, although my eye was drawn to your natural-looking compositions made up of 25 frames!! That's some serious stitching, especially in Photoshop - if you have time, it would be great if you could do a short tutorial on how you go about doing this, perhaps in the Landscape section...

Here's a couple of examples of user tutorials:

http://www.cameralabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1961

http://www.cameralabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1864

I'm going off-topic now, so back to the subject of macro!

Hi Gordon,

I could do a tutorial, but there isn't much to tutor really I take the landscape mosaics by hand (no tripod) and try to give approximately 20% overlap between frames. The 54-frame mosaic of North Weirs was assembled using CS3 (which aligns and blends automatically) and it only took an hour to sort that out, which is pretty impressive. If you blow the image up and look very carefully you'll see that CS3 failed to do a perfect job on the telephone lines towards the right hand side of the image.

Back onto macro-mosaics (this section) and the Hawk Moth is around 50 frames too!!! This time I do use a tripod and I use the 100 mm Canon macro lens at 1:1. I physically move the butterfly (or moth) under the lens while looking through the viewfinder to make sure I get a reasonable frame overlap. The camera setting is manual, I go for around f#16 (or slightly smaller) and I hand hold the flash at an angle to minimise any shadow behind the wing/body. I use autofocus as my eyesight is so poor I can't use manual focus. When I move off the wing onto the background I switch to manual focus, but leave it in the position it was when photographing the wing. When I then come back across to the wing again I go back to autofocus. That's all there is to it really, and the only real hassle is getting the flash position sorted to minimise shadows on the grey card background.

Greg

_________________
Nexstar 11 GPS, 2 x Sky 90, M25C, MaximDL, Photshop CS3, Noel Carboni's Photoshop actions, 7 foot Pulsar fibreglass dome, Canon 40D, 100mm macro lens, 28-200mm zoom lens, 17-55mm f#2.8 zoom lens, 100-400mm zoom lens, 1.4x converter, 2x converter.
http://www.newforestobservatory.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/

Hi Greg, that's exactly what I was after!