Female Common Mormon - 100mm macro

After I got my Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, I wanted to use it as single lens for both birding as well as macro. I have used Canon EF 300mm f/4.0L IS USM successfully in the past and got pretty good result. It was a great macro lens but the reach for bird photography was not there as its performance 1.4x teleconverter was average. 2.0x convertor was bad. f/2.8 lens was great with both these convertors and remained as sharp as original. This prompted me to try it as single all in one lens.

As a test I tried shooting female Common Mormon Butterfly (Papilio polytes)sitting on rose leaves during rain. You can check the details about the butterfly in article Male Common Mormon Butterfly.

The photo on the top shows my presently favored approach. It is shot using Canon EOS 5D Mark II with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS II USM using ExpoImaging Ray Flash Adapter on Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash. The exposure using flash ring adapter gave a nice even light and ISO 200 with aperture of F/14 produced nice deep (in macro terms) depth of field. I was working nearly a feet away from the butterfly. Some insects get intimidated by such proximity of humans and it is difficult to capture them. If you notice the flash also made the background dark as the ambient light was very low. This can help to isolate your subject from cluttered background. But it also produces an unnatural look to the photo. Some shy critters will not allow you to approach this close.

Female Common Mormon - 300mm f/2.8

Here in my second photo I used Canon EOS 7D with Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM Lens on Canon EF 1.4x II Extender. The light was pretty low as it was raining heavily. So I used ISO 3200 to get hand holdable speed of 1/180th of second exposure at f/4 aperture. This setup gave me a sufficient working distance of around 3 meters from butterfly. I was standing under shade of roof and shooting this butterfly which was protecting my gear from rain. The safe distance allows you to get those shy type of critters easily.

There is price to pay for this comfort (I am not talking about the price of the lens here ) The lens is heavy, depth of field is very shallow. As you can see at f/4 aperture which was possible under the existing light butterflies antennae are out of focus even though the eyes are. Since the camera is far off I can’t use the flash and ring adapter to light up also. I can now use the naked Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash to throw as much light at the subject. Light reaching subject will be low. I can use either Better Beamer flash extender to concentrate the light on the butterfly or I can keep the flash off camera close to the subject. In the field this is difficult to achieve with fast moving subjects.

As you can see there is no easy shortcut to take for macro photography. Dedicated macro lens has advantages and several plus points. Using such an lens can achieve a great magnification and closeup shot of the subject. In the future blogs let us see how we can use extension tubes to alter minimum focusing distance and thus increasing magnification.

Miresa Moth

It was raining heavily on that day, I saw a brown hairy moth sitting the shade of Cashew (Anacardium occidentale) leaf. It had dull yellowish body, pale yellow hindwings and rufous brown forewings with yellowish white patches. I used Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lens using Rayflash on my Canon Speedlite 580EX II

Thanks to Roger C. Kendrick of Hong Kong Moths I could Identify it as Miresa Species of moth belonging to Limacodidae family of moths in the superfamily Zygaenoidea. They are often called slug moths because their caterpillars bear a distant resemblance to slugs. They are also called cup moths because of the shape of their cocoons. They are mostly tropical, but occur worldwide, with about 1000 described species and probably many more as yet undescribed species.

They are small, hairy moths, with reduced or absent mouthparts and fringed wings. They often perch with their abdomens sticking out at 90 degrees from the thorax and wings. Caterpillars of these moths are typically very flattened, and instead of prolegs they have suckers. The thoracic legs are reduced, but always present and they locomote by rolling waves rather than walking with individual prolegs. They even use a lubricant, a kind of liquified silk to move on.

Miresa Moth

The Limacodidae are perhaps best known for their slug-like larvae, sometimes smooth, but usually invested with urticating spines that can cause profound irritation to the skin, leading to their common name of ‘nettle-grubs’. The larvae of most species appear to be polyphagous, feeding on a wide range of plant families. No obvious examples of specificity have been located.

The Limacodidae family larvae attack a wide variety of crops, mainly trees and shrubs such as coconut palm (Elaeis, Cocos), banana (Musa, Musaceae), coffee (Coffea, Rubiaceae), tea (Camellia, Theaceae), cocoa (Theobroma, Sterculiaceae), Citrus various (Rutaceae), mango (Mangifera, Anacardiaceae), and rambutan (Nephelium, Sapindaceae).

Exposure Fusion

Pre-Monsoon clouds were gathering as I shot this photo at Seethanadi Nature Camp inside Someshwara Wild Life Sanctuary, Hebri Karkala. I used Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens on a tripod to get 3 bracketed images at 2 stop difference. I used Photomatix Pro to fuse exposure of these three bracketed shots to produce this photo. In Expo­sure Fusion a series of brack­eted images are processed to produce a dynamic range image. It takes the best tonal­i­ties from each image in the sequence and com­bines them to cre­ate a sin­gle image. Best part of each image gets recorded and fused together to com­bine all of the best ele­ments in final image. You have quite a lot of control to adjust which tonality of the exposures are used in the final image.

You might ask how is Expo­sure fusion is different from HDR? The only resem­blance the two have are that they com­bine a sequence of brack­eted images together. In Expo­sure Fusion the final prod­uct looks more real­is­tic to how the scene really would like. This means that the shad­ows main­tain a cer­tain amount of shad­ows and the high­lights remain brighter in higher tonal­i­ties then a high con­trast scene.

HDR takes the sequence of images and blends the images seam­lessly but does its best to even the tonal­i­ties in the extreme tonal­i­ties of shad­ows and high­lights. That is why HDR the appear­s arti­fi­cial­ and unnat­u­ral­.

Expo­sure Fusion after fus­ing the images together keeps the tonal­i­ties how they would appear if one was to be look­ing at the actual scene being pho­tographed. HDR image most of the time shows the uneven tran­si­tion between the lumi­nance and can there­fore lose the appeal of real­ism. Expo­sure Fusion pro­duces results that are truer to the scene that the pho­tog­ra­pher is try­ing to capture.

Photomatix Pro produces both fantastic HDR as well as Exposure Fusion. Try it and you will love the results. Trial mode is also available for Photomatix Pro.