#found my 60mm macro lens and ND filters

[ca-d]

when you miss spring and flowers and all things green and your girlfriend buys you just because flowers(they’re a crazy pretty orange color too 😭)

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Researching for the next Cooks Beach trip:

Below are my notes from researching what gear I will need and some tips and tricks on how to produce the types of images I want.

Gear list:

Tripod

Camera body

Wide angle lens (14-24mm and low aperture f.28-f/4)

Star app

ND filter kit (borrow from my mum)

Ring light flash

Astrophotography

Best time to shoot astrophotography is a new moon given that there is less light in the night sky, creating the dark skies needs for stars to show up well in images. This works out well for me as the new moon is on the 3rd of October and I will be shooting this on the night of the 4th of October. The coromandel peninsula area seems to be a good spot to stargaze as well. The milky way is typically visible over New Zealand between February and October. The time of year I am shooting requires me to shoot around 10-11pm. Since I am at the send of the viewing season, I am struggle to get a good view. If so, I will have to see if it is possible to focus on constellations that are visible instead.

I have heard this mention of ‘stacking’ images particularly when researching astrophotography. I will need to read further about what this means.

Camera settings: need lens as above which will give great results with right settings. ISO will change depending on the amount of ambient light, I may be able to keep it as low as 1600 but may need to go as high as 5-10000 in a very dark location. There is little light pollution in the area so the latter may be the case. I should use the 500 rule for the shutter speed. Ideal for astrophotography is 15-30 seconds. The longer the shutter is open, the higher the possibility of star trails (although this is an effect that I could use to my advantage). To figure out the best shutter speed, take 500 and divide it by the lens focal length (e.g. 500/16 = 31).

It can be hard for a camera to focus on this, so turn infinity focus off and find the brightest star, centre it in the middle of the screen and manually focus till sharp.  

Long exposure

Find a composition - start by looking for a stable elements to focus the camera on. To maintain some texture in the water, keep the shutter speed between 1/15 and 1 second, but play around when shooting. For example, a 10+ second exposure will create very smooth looking water. It can be helpful to turn on continuous shooting mode on the camera to capture a range of images when you set up the camera, instead of relying on finding the perfect moment manually. I plan on shooting water, but clouds could also be a subject of interest. For this work, use the lowest ISO possible, around ISO 100. Increasing this will introduce noise.

Shutter speed – ‘bulb mode.’ This is a setting on canon camera that allows you to select any shutter speed. The shutter will stay open for as long as the shutter release button is held down. This is the “B” found on the shutter scale in manual mode. This is where a remote shutter may be useful. It may be possible to download the Canon Camera Connect App to achieve this. Some cameras may have time exposure mode which works in the same way as bulb mode but require one press of the shutter release to start the exposure and one press to end it.

I need to make sure the lens I will be borrowing from the loan pool will be able to mount the ND filter attachment. Some sources mention a remote shutter release, this may be helpful but I don’t think I will have access to one (although I know that the EOS-90D from the loan pool has a touch screen shutter).

Neutral density filter – these reduce the amount of light that enters the camera, enabling longer shutter speeds even in bright daylight. These filters do not have any effect on the colour of the images. I had trouble in my first trip because I wasn’t aware that I would need them.

Macro photography

For this I will need the same macro lens I loaned for my first trip. This lens is a 60mm f2.8 canon macro lens. The loan camera does have a built in flash but I found this didn’t produce good lighting given how close I was to the object. Online sources suggest that a ring light flash that attaches to the front of the lens. For this work, manual focus is best.

Stacking

This technique is used when you take multiple images and merge them. One of the reasons this is done is to increase how much of the image is in focus. What impacts depth of field? The focal length of lens – a wide angle lens will have a bigger depth of field. Appeature – the wider the appeature, the more light is in the camera, the smaller the depth and field so less of the image will be in focus, the opposite is true for a narrow appeature. Distance to the subject – the closer you are to the subject you are focussing on, the shallower the depth of field. The purpose of stakcing images works much like how our eyes work. The two eye works together to produce the image we see based on various focal points in what we are looking at. Stacking is done by taking images of the same subject multiple times where the focal plane changes and are merged in post. Overall, you have an image with a bigger depth of field where it may not be possible to capture that same depth of field in a single image of a subject or environment. In the example video I watched on photographing jumping spiders (which are tiny!), the photographer gets in close and uses a rapid burst to get several exposures, moving ever so slightly closer which creates a slifhtly different focal plane each time. These images are then taken into a photo editing software and merged.

Astrophotography stacking – Image stacking in astrophotography is not used to increase depth of field like it is used in landscape and macrophotography, but to reduce noise. This seems like a very technical topic, but essentially, stacking images for this purpose allows you to drop the ISO without actually doing so. Typically photography of this kind (given the amount of ambient light in the scene) the ISO need to be quite high, of course this will introduce noise into the image. If the images are shot in ISO 6400, stacking 4 images will make it look like the ISO has dropped by half, another 8 will half that again, 16, 32, and so on. There is a free software that can the align the stars and freeze the background.