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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At Last Sharp Pictures!!

I've often felt that the pictures I've taken on my Canon 7D are not always as sharp as they could be.  Its been noticeable in a number of situations and I've put it down to operator error or wrong settings. 

Its been particlulary annoying when going out with others to do wildlife pictures.  Ok perhaps I can't expect to compete with a Canon 5DS Mk II and a 300mm f2.8 L lens, with my 7D and Sigma 120 - 400mm lens but I'm sure I should be able to get sharp(er) shots more of the time.  The Sigma lens is well regarded and I do get the odd sharp shot but not as often as I should.  In some images I can see that the Auto Focus (AF) point is spot on an animals eye for example but the eye is "soft".

One of the things that was bugging me was that certain shots with the subject close to the ground, showed sharp focus in the foreground going soft on the main subject.  After a bit of judicious Googling, I stumbled on a page from Northlight Images which exactly described my problem and how to fix it.

I'll not replicate here the work on the Northlight website, suffice to say that when I tested my camera/lens combination, the sharp point was indeed in front of the AF point.  Using the 7D's "Micro Adjustment" feature I was able to correct this in the "test" scenario.  I've had a quick go "in the field" and things did seem much much better though low light levels and high ISO's meant things were a little soft all the way through.

Hopefully I'll get out in good light in the next couple of days and see a great improvement.

Watch this space!