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Lichen Garden

Started 3 months ago | Photos thread
jmiller1948
OP jmiller1948 Senior Member • Posts: 1,173
Re: Lichen Garden

maggiemole wrote:

You have inspired me to try to shoot my own lichen garden - and that's when I began to appreciate your skill!

Shot at f8 indoors on a day of very poor natural light, with added light from LumeCube2, hand-held. Background is ordinary copy paper - don't know how to do it on a black background.

I shoot M43 with a GX9 and Olympus 30mm macro lens, and this was originally a stack of 45. I culled it to 30 TIFFs then stacked them in Helicon Focus. I found the stacking difficult, and cursed the cropping that occurs when shooting Post Focus. I dislike tripods and used a monopod to try to keep the camera fixed, but even that was awkward. Placing the subjects, the camera, the light and the monopod made me quite bad-tempered! C&C and your own improvements very welcome.

Thanks for the compliments, maggiemole.  First, I think a tripod is essential.  At macro range the slightest camera shake is deadly to IQ.  With the small apertures needed to get enough DoF to avoid stacking 50 images, shutter speeds are quite slow, making any motion even worse.  The black background is easy: I use a piece of black poster board and then adjust the black point in post to make it look even blacker.  The black background keeps the shadows like you produced from being seen too.

Get your tripod out and give it another go.  Those gold lichen species would look great with more magnification and against a black background.

 jmiller1948's gear list:jmiller1948's gear list
Nikon D850 Nikon AF-S Nikkor 16-35mm F4G ED VR Nikon AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II Nikon AF-S Micro-Nikkor 105mm F2.8G IF-ED VR Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-120mm F4G ED VR +8 more
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