Live View Macro tip

One of the great things for me about photography is the way you can experiment and get unexpected results.  I've recently been doing a bit more macro stuff see The Wasp here and have been playing around with extension tubes and extenders.

A boon to Macro shooting on my Canon 7D, is LiveView as it allows you to move the point of focus to exactly where you want it, and with some of the shallow DOF's Macro work has, this is essential and easier done in LiveView than peering through the viewfinder.

This is fine if you are working with continuous light (maybe LEDs), but using external Flash, the Liveview screen is black, even with the modelling lights on.  (see below).

However, I found accidentally that if you pop up the on camera flash whilst in LiveView, for some reason (not sure why, happy to hear from someone more knowledgeable why this works) the camera recalibrates and the subject is clearly visible.



















This means that you have access to the LiveView ability to zoom in tight and get focussed where you want to be, lock everything down, lower the flash, carefully put the external flash trigger into the hotshoe and start snapping.

Oh and if you'd like to see what I was snapping its Here.

Cheers, Peter.


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Should you tell?

I had the idea for a picture of my dog George sitting in autumn leaves, and as he's from a shooting background, a dead Pheasant on the Ground in front of him.  Lots of autumnal browns and yellows, and a brown dog as well as the plumage of the Pheasant.

But the chances of getting George to sit still on his own, let alone with a Pheasant just in front of him was pretty remote, so I had to resort to other tactics.

I ended up shooting a background of leaves at a local park, and using OnOne softwares excellent Focal Point 2 (onone software) to provide a realistic focus blur to it.

That evening I set up a couple of Studio Flash stands with softboxes, a table full of collected leaves, and the dog sat in the middle.  The following night I did the same with a Pheasant my wife had obtained from a local farmer.

Then it was a task to cut out the dog and Pheasant in Photoshop, assemble the lot and colour balance the various parts (see below).

Now I quite like the final image, BUT it has polarised opinion once I've revealed how it was made, with one individual claiming "oh thats fantastic" before I told them, and "I don't like it now" once I'd let on.

Its as though the magic was gone for him because I had invented a reality rather than captured it, and somehow this was wrong.

Which poses the question, if you've created an image like this should you tell people its not real?

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