IFLC Week 1 Day 5

My goal for practicing for the macro class was to go through one booklet per week. I feel like I'm rushing a bit this first week, but thought I'd get through it just fine. I read ahead in the 2nd discovery book and realized that to really get as much out of this class as I can, I have to spend more than 1 week per booklet. I don't have nearly enough available time to spend practicing. Even though I will be done with the teaching part of the class in just over 2 weeks, I plan on continuing with the course structure until I'm done. With a lot of nights spent working, I don't know how long it will take. Obviously I have a lifetime to learn and take photos. There is no need to rush. With that said, instead of moving ahead tonight, I decided to spend a bit more time on some of the previous concepts for the week.

I know at this point, I'm not supposed to be using flash yet. I added the earlier in the night to take some shots of my daughter. There was a setting that was wrong that I couldn't figure out how to fix. So I reset it and was able to get full strength on my flash again. Because of that, I had to tackle my old friend again. I still don't fully know what I'm doing with the flash, but even the mostly auto settings I use helps. I took this shot with a very narrow f/4.2 getting only 1 droplet in focus.


I then closed down to f/13 to get more of the droplets in focus.


Keeping the flash on, I moved outside. It was nearly dark, but I wanted to see what I could do with the flash. Since it was so dark (and I'm not very good hitting my focus yet), I missed this shot.


I moved to another flower using my widest aperture, I tried to shoot this flower a bit different than I had before. The shot looked brighter on the back of my camera than it does here. Had I see it was this dark I would've boosted my exposure a bit.


This is the same shot, but I hit my focus a bit better as I was aiming for the middle.


I then decided to stop using the flash and moved to the garage to shoot some stuff. I worked a bit on selective focus. I had to bump the ISO up to 800 to have a chance to get this shot. The shutter speed was still slower than I wanted at 1/50 second which is too slow for me. I tried to get the cable in focus and actually got it.


Staying at my widest aperture I move on to the week lock to work on planing and paralleling. Here I was only able to get 1 tiny bit in focus.


Moving more towards parallel, I was able to get more in focus


I then did a bit more work on depth of field. I added an extra lamp and was able to get back down to ISO 200. I shot this wire brush wide open to only get the end of 1 bristle in focus.


Stopping down to f/14, I had to bump the ISO back up to 800. This allowed me to get slightly more depth of field.


For this last shot, I decided to try play a bit. I added the flash and closed down the aperture all the way to f/57. The room was a bit dark too. So it was difficult to find exactly where the perfect focus was. I thought the tiny aperture would help, but it looks slightly off. Obviously I needed more light.


I'm realizing these shots I export from lightroom appear to be a bit darker than the jpgs that come out of the camera. I'm comparing what's on flickr to what I have on my computer and flickr is definitely a touch darker. I still seem to be off on a lot of the exposures, but this could be part of the reason for me thinking I'm closer. Even more interesting, after I posted this blog, I open it up just to make sure all the shots were there and I see that the images here are brighter than I currently see them on flickr. Very interesting. Maybe my shots haven't been quite as under exposed as I thought and they are closer to what I'm actually seeing when I review them on the camera. That would sure be helpful.