Macro - Micro Fly, Bugs and Ants

[seemolf]

FZ5 and Achromat +7.7 diopter

Macro in natural light - first three pictures
A Bug with bounced and diffused onboard flash (3 pics)

...and

Ants with diffused and bounced onboard flash, 50mm reversed lens = +20 diopter
...extremely small depth of field (DOF)

The last picture is a combination of three handheld shots, combined by helicon focus.
The shots covered consecutive layers of appr. 0,2mm depth.

----all pictures can be enlarged with a simple click ---

Any comments appreciated!

Sven

you can see the data of these lenses here:
http://www.geocities.com/seemolf/ach...ats.html#chart

[RedStickMan]

Awesome pictures. Love the bright colors of the beetles. It'sphotos like thesethat inspire me to get down there with the bugs and try to get the really great shots!

[Macnite]

Incredible work seemolf! I love them all! I even like the housefly. I can't wait to get my macro lens.

[bayourebel]

sven, what can I add, that hasn't been said. Seems that you and Narmer are always on top with your photos.

Great work as always.

Jerry

[Dutch Dave]

Shock and Awe!

Great shots!

[Narmer]

Absolutely Great Series, Sven.

I love these colors (FZ5 greens and reds are better than FZ20 ones) and the shots are nearly perfect composition and focus-wise.

Next week I'll buyan external with twistable head, and in the meantime I ve bought a very cheap, 15€ Woctron manual flash which I 'll test tomorrow diffusing its light (not twistable head).

Your +7,7 Achromat doesn't seem worse than its equivalent, Raynox DCR 250.

Very good also the composition of reversed angle shots: it could seems a little faking, but it's reaLLY the only way to have decent DOF with mid-high zoom on FZ lacking a F/16 or 32.

Congratulations for these brilliant pictures

Narmer

[schmintan]

excellent images, and they look just as good as they did on dpreview.com!! :-):G

[seemolf]

thanks to all of you...

RedStickMan, you have a great start here and I like your avatar too!

Macnite - that's a good news: You will be a member of the "macro club".

Jerry, it not so easy to follow the footsteps of other members. Some of them are always some (or more) steps ahead!

Another nice avatar, Dutch Dave!

Francesco the colours are not altered, but there is one final trick:
After processing the pictures (resize, neat image, USM) I sometimes use an unsharp mask of 20-30% and a circle of 250. This brings back the original contrast.
I have tried an external flash which is twistable. It is essential to adjust the power of these flashes. But my pictures with the onboard flash are better up to now. I will have to train the new technique.
The Olympus lens is much better than the Raynox lens! The resulting images may have a similar quality, but the a life size covers a range of 1 to 12 cm and the vignetting dcr250 only 1-3cm. Bigger glass helps in this case.
I am still searching for a trick to get better DOF - there is always hope! There is one example on my achromats page, but nobody has seen it ;-)
http://www.geocities.com/seemolf/ach...achromats.html

schmintan, this forum does not have so many "talkers". But this is still my favourite forum, because the pictures can be shown in full size and enlarged by a click. There are nice members on both sites of course.

Sven

[Narmer]

I had already seen those two pages on geocities.

Thanks for the tip

[tchuanye]

Nice series Sven!

My pic would be the #4 and #5 side profile orange bug pic!