melev

I've been shooting with my Nikon D90 for about three years now, yet always try to learn new things from others. I was chatting with a few photogs on Facebook yesterday about super macro shots. Basically, everyone always says to shoot RAW and I've been stubborn about it because I don't print any of my pictures. The other setting is to save huge images to the memory card, instead of small ones. When I say small, they were still much larger than your average monitor:

Small: 2144 x 1424 - 3.1 megs
Medium: 3216 x 2136 - 6.9 megs
Large: 4288 x 2848 - 12.2 megs

Selecting the bigger image will allow one to crop out a decent image from the whole, in theory. All this time I thought the reason others could capture these incredible fat fluffy polyps was due to their lens, their camera model, and extension tubes. Apparently if you take a poster-sized image and cut out a smaller section, it will contain plenty of nice detail. As with everything, I usually don't care enough to know exactly why something does it; I just want to know how to do it myself for similar results. Keep it simple, right? From what I was told, I have the proper gear but haven't been utilizing it as much as I could have. What?

Since I tend to take 25 - 100 pictures at a time, do I really want to deal with downloading ~1.2 gigs of data per session? No. When I take these pictures and process them, even a 3 meg picture will end up being between 180k to 290k on the web. It's called "Save For Web" for a reason - so others don't have to wait for the images to load when viewing a page, a build thread, a blog or article. I already have at least 60,000 images amassed on my hard drives, and from time to time I peruse them looking for specific content-related images I need. Bigger images take up more space, and the resulting lag when trying to view groups searching for a specific image. (I do try to throw away trash pictures, but tend to hold onto others even though odds are they will never be used.)

I had to give the suggestions a try. The camera settings: Large images, RAW + JPEG FINE, mounted on a tripod with the 105mm AF-S Macro lens. I was told to use Mirror Lock Up (MLU), but the D90 doesn't have that feature. I found an article with a recommended alternative. [ link ] It is called Exposure Delay Mode, and creates a 1 second lag before the picture is taken. Using an IR remote trigger, I took about a dozen pictures trying to capture a closer image than previously attempts. Let's see if recording a massive file will result in a good looking cropped shot.

Lighting conditions weren't optimal. VHO Super Actinics were on, and the first metal halide cycle was 20,000K. The tank was a bit dim, and the overall look was blue. Still, I wanted to try out the new procedure.

This image is what the coral looked like, straight off the memory card. SWEET, but fake. I wish it looked like this. This is only resized to share online for your entertainment. I repeat, this is not a real coral. If it was, I'd get rich quick.

Here are three shots I liked, each were cropped maybe 20% or so, with minor tweaks in Lightroom 5. Any closer and they looked noisy.

Here is the Metadata for the next image.

After posting the above on Facebook, it was recommended I lower the ISO, increase Aperture, and decrease shutter speed. Increasing Aperture enlarges the Depth of Field so more of the coral will come into focus. I gave it another try. This next shot is untouched, as the camera saved it.

I found that adjusting the Kelvin spectrum in Lightroom isn't what I'd expected. Editing this picture, I set the software color temperature to 20,000K, but it looked wrong. 7000K-8000K was pretty accurate. 5000K looks prettier, but isn't true to life. According to Lightroom, before editing the image's color temp was 4850K.

I made some Lightroom adjustments, as seen below. And in case anyone wonders, this is a 12.2 meg image that has been reduced to 300k for sharing.

One thing that is very obvious when I zoom in is that the ISO must be lower to avoid grainy artifacts. It's going to have to be less than 800, for sure. Once I can get a nice picture at a lower ISO, I'll be able to crop away nearly 75% of the rest of the picture and still have something nice to share, since the "Large" version is over 4200 pixels wide and my final web-ready picture is 770 pixels wide. One thing I know never looks good is to crop out a tiny postage stamp area and then blow it up to 770 pixels. Crop what you need to show, then resize it smaller to share, or crop to the desired size. Don't attempt to zoom or enlarge a cropped image because it will always pixelate.

I'll keep at it, as I really want to get closer macros where only a few polyps fill the frame. I can already tell that the image contains more detail that my previous "Small" JPEG-FINE images did not.

Hopefully 2014 will provide more eye candy to enjoy, better than previous work. I'll try to keep my wasted hard drive space grumbling to a minimum.