gardenersassistant

Lovely set. Clarity, colours, compositions; all very pleasing.

Interesting once more how we read an image differently. For me, if that antenna were a leading line it wouldn't be directing me towards the face; it would need to point more towards the centre of ...

I agree. But you wrote in response to John, "I have yet to see any fly image you have shot with this much detail." That seems to me to be distinctly competitive, and actually in the nature of a ...

Are these two examples live animals captured in the wild Don? Actually, I had a similar question about your two shots in the top post; I wondered whether they were they captured live in their ...

I very much like the Raynox 150. It was my most used close-up lens for insects, spiders etc for many years. I hope you enjoy yours, although I suspect that using it on a 100mm macro might not ...

Thanks Henry.

For any close-up lens, the maximum focusing distance (when the camera lens is focused at infinity) is around 1000mm / diopters. The Raynox 150 is 4.8 diopters, so the maximum focusing distance is ...

It is rather bright compared to the subject, and unlike the bright areas at the top which are smooth, it has detail/texture which makes it rather stand out for me. However, given that it is mostly ...

Thanks. :) It's a pleasure.

It feels that way. It probably depends on the camera and the type of AF, but with my systems focus acquisition time can be variable. And with anything other than an almost instant response there ...

Yes. For these I give the processor (PhotoLab) a white balance to use taken from a calibration shot for the diffuser setup I'm using. This works nicely as flash is the dominant light source. Intere ...

My current setup is a bit unusual. It is big and heavy, and still under development .(Adjusting our rigs can be a process on and off for years for some of us. Especially with flash diffuser setups ...

Could be. PhotoLab does the raw conversion and also does shadow raising. How its internal pipeline works I have no idea. I sometimes do additional shadow raising in Lightroom, on TIFF files coming ...

This is making me wonder what specifically the problem is with the Raynox. I suspect it might be the need to get the working distance within a fairly narrow window with the Raynox 250. I used a ...

I am finding that timing is key. This is with manual focus. My hands shake and especially at higher magnifications the subject is continually going in and out of focus, as I can see from the focus ...

That appears to be consistent with what I found when I experimented with this. As I wrote here (see the emboldened section at the end below - the preceding text is context):

There are various options. First though, some questions: (1) Do you know that with a Raynox 250 the working distance between the front of the Raynox and the subject has to be no more than 125mm, and ...

Quite so. Horses for courses. For macro there really is a great deal to be gained from small apertures.

That isn't my experience. It depends on the context. Sometimes the roughly doubling of depth of field for each two stops reduction in aperture can outweigh the concomitant loss of detail from ...

It's certainly challenging with subjects that don't stay long in one place, the more so when a breeze is moving the plants around, so well done capturing those images. I used autofocus for over a ...