A few Christmas Macros
During the winter months here in New England my cameras tend to sit on a shelf anxiously awaiting the colors of spring. The exception might be a snapshot or two of snow covered mountains and valleys, captured while skiing. Indoors, I take pictures where I can. That may mean food photography or family photos during Thanksgiving and Christmas. In addition, a few years ago while setting up the Christmas tree and getting the ornaments out, I found another fun way to use my camera. I noticed how beautiful some of the handmade Christmas ornaments were. By setting them up one by one on a wooden table 5-10 feet from the tree I have been able to get some nice “macro” shots like these.
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| E-M1 and Olympus 12-100 at 100mm at F4 |
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This is actually a pop-up Christmas card.
Open up the card and this little paper village pops up!
Panasonic GX85 and Olympus 12-40 at 40mm at F2.8 |
I see that I used two different cameras and four different lenses for my growing collection of Christmas macros; the lenses being the Olympus 60mm, Olympus 12-40mm, Olympus 12-100mm and Panasonic 14-140mm. But just about any lens will work. The idea is to fill the frame with the ornament, and the amount of blurriness in the background will depend on the F-stop used and on the distance between the ornament and the background. I see that in all cases I used the widest aperture on each lens.
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| Olympus E-M1 and 60mm macro at F2.8 |
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| Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic 14-140 at 46mm (92mm equiv) at F5.0 |
I also used an on-camera flash. I’m not talking about the flash that is built into the camera, but a separate flash that sits in the hot shoe and can rotate and articulate. For these images I tilted the flash upward at an angle half way between horizontal and vertical, and then rotated the flash head sideways (90 degrees) to the left. I could have chosen 90 degrees to the right, but most of the ambient light was already coming from the kitchen which was on the right.
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| Olympus E-M1 and 60mm macro at F2.8 |
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| Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic 14-140 at 40m (92mm equiv) at F4.7 |
To get the overall exposure correct, my standard (perhaps default is a better word) procedure is to adjust the exposure of the camera so that it is one-stop underexposed. For example if the correct exposure without a flash had been, say, 1/30sec, F4 and ISO1600, then I would set the camera to 1/30, F4, ISO800. This is the equivalent of cutting the exposure (i.e. the light) in half. After mounting and angling the flash, I’d adjust the flash power manually to provide the “missing” half of the light needed for a reasonable exposure. You’ll need to experiment to find the appropriate flash power level, as this depends on a number of variables, such as camera aperture, the height and color of the ceiling and the color of the walls from which light is being bounced. Usually flashes can be adjusted to power levels of 1/128, 1/64, 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1/1 (full). Your subject isn’t going anywhere, so experimenting with flash settings is easy.
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| Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic 14-140 at 65m (130mm equiv) at F5.3 |
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| Olympus E-M1 and 60mm macro at F2.8 |
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