Selected highlights from the forum. Like the July tips, Ill put the most recent first.
(From Dawn) If you haven’t tried already, maybe take a white foam board/poster board and lean it up to reflect some light so you don’t get too harsh of shadows in the bright sun. I would tend to agree that a lower aperture with a faster shutter speed will help. So far with the closeups I’ve done, I’m shooting f8 or 5.6 at 1/200 and using the manual auto focus dot selector (technical term) to choose where I focus.
(From Mouse ear) For a given effective focal length and aperture, you get greater DOF from a digital compact than from a DSLR. Apparently, the DOF is proportional to crop factor. The G3’s crop factor is approx. 4.5, so gives about three times the DOF you’ll get from an APS-C sensor.
(From Lostinbids) At f45 you will get massive amounts of diffraction (unless it is large format not 35mm). I would recommend repeating and trying f11. If you do not have the DOF you wanted then you have 2 choices shoot from further away and crop in or use a lens with tilt.
( From benlin) Summary is image size on sensor is rendered at 1:1 scale (or larger) to subject size, although lots of lenses will try to tell you otherwise. Extremely shallow DOF requires small apertures if you want to increase DOF. Great for portraits because of the shallow DOF.
(From Leviticus) Ales has hit the nail on he head with the manual focus comment, because of the shallow DOF it’s needed for precision control, the AF on the 105 nikkor just doesn’t cut it really. When I use the 105mm it’s always in manual focus and usually at quite a high aperture f/11+ and have gone up to f/54.0 once or twice (on an image of a dead bee for example) when needed. Obviously the lower the aperture the more light is needed as mentioned. The 105mm is also very useful as a portrait lens as well as a true 1:1 macro which is an added bonus.
(From Alesveluscek) Hi, I use Sigma 105 macro. It is very nice lens. I think bigest difference between true macro and ‘1:2.x’ macro lens is in manual focosing. Most my work in macro is done by manual focusing. I like manual focusing on macro (my case sigma 105mm). It has very long rotation of focusing ring for very very precise focusing, which is needed for very shallow DOF.
(From Dvorjkausen) (referring to the Sigma 17-70mm F2.8-4.5 DC MACRO) The key piece of information there is: “Maximum magnification of 1:2.3 enables close-up photography like a macro lens.”
So it does allow close up photography “like” a macro lense but isn’t a true macro lens.
Having said that the 17-70 will probably do a reasonable job at 50-70mm where, I suspect, the distortion will be minimised. You might have to then crop in a bit if the object still isn’t big enough.
The other thing to remember is that in Macro photography the DOF is generally very narrow so you want small apertures (f8+) so you need lots of light.
(From Dvorjkausen) Most true MACRO lenses will have MACRO somewhere in their names. Some are more “true” than others I suspect. In most cases if you can get really close to something and have it in sharp focus it might be a macro. The degree of how small it is to start off with and how big it ends up, I suspect, varies. Here is another bunch of links I found which might be interesting.
(From leviticus) Am another user of the AF Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8D before the VR version (lovely piece of glass) can’t speak for the VR although have heard good stuff about it.
(From bloodstone) If you have a canon, I’ve got 100mm f/2.8 macro great lense and use it lot.
(From Benlin) If Nikon, the current 105mm 2.8 VR is awesome. I haven’t used any other Nikon macro lenses. If Canon, the 105mm 2.8 is the way to go. You can get by with the 50mm one, but it only renders images 1:2 and auto focus is annoying, though you’ll be manually focusing most of the time.
(From Northlightimages) I’m using a Nikon 60mm F2.8 AF Macro lens – lovely crisp lens, very happy with it, but might recommend going for the slightly longer one (105mm macro) just to be able to add a little distance between lens and subject (there’s definately times when thats useful). Both are great lenses though!