I am not very good at macro, don’t really know where to look for living things to shoot. All I could find was spiders and spiders..
The problem with cameras is this, when there is no sunlight right above you.. it is too dark to shoot anything. The result will not be sharp enough, sometimes grainy and most of the time blur. I am trying to seek for a good result that is proper enough for print, but I feel that I am either incapacitated by gear or most probably skill.
These 2 shots were fluke. The photos were coming out a little too cold for my liking and I accidentally flipped my Nex F3’s inbuilt flash. Oh well, what the heck. I pointed the flash towards the leaf and shoot. Then I stood there gaping at my photos.
SO THEY USE FLASH FOR MACRO IN DAYLIGHT!! It finally dawned on me. I could have used it at the butterfly farm!!
Oh btw, I’ve finally gotten my hands on Adobe CS6 Photoshop. The crop tool is really helpful for this batch of photos. They were sitting in my folder for months and I didn’t know how to process them until I read that the new crop tool have helpful grids for diagonal, triangles, golden ratio, spiral and grid. I really needed all those grids to align the flow of my photos.
As I read more and more photography articles.. I am beginning to find flaws in my camera and lenses. The bokeh is not creamy at all. Then I start to wonder if photos that won awards are good photos cuz of the emotions they evoke or cuz of the myriad of technical perfection. Technical perfection like creamy bokeh, perfect sharp edges of the entire subject matter, no vignetting and dust particles.. no distortion. Something only an expensive gear set could produce.
Feeling abit bleak about photography when I got to that point. Cuz if it’s quality money can buy then there is a high chance I will not get there ever.
Then I wonder why I bought a camera that is cheaper and inferior compared to my first camera.. the Nikon D70s. The specifications have caught up, definitely but compared to today’s SLR.. my camera is far behind. But I love this camera for its ease of usage. I can roughly dial in a mood with the white balance and filters, then focus more on composing the shot instead of worrying bout the exposure.
Sometimes without realizing, I stack exposures and apertures on top of each other to get the result I want. Then I found out that other people have been doing that. They even have a term for it called focus stacking. After realizing that, I vowed never to stack focuses anymore.
3 years ago, I was painting light and giving rim lights to my portraits using a tablet. That hasn’t change today. Still couldn’t afford a lighting set and have no space to keep them too. 🙁 Feeling abit down recently…there are those people that love a certain hobby and is talented at them. Then there are those that love the hobby but is never good at them no matter how they try. And then those that can only dream about doing it.
