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Old 17-02-2012, 09:34 PM
Dennis
Dazzled by the Cosmos.

Dennis is offline
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 11,811
Macro – MP-E65 challenges slowly being mastered

Hello,

Here are some quite detailed photos of jumping spiders and other small insects taken with the Canon MP-E65. The camera/lens was tripod mounted which has restricted me to shooting at the edge of shrubs and bushes only.

This lens goes from 1:1 to 5:1 and requires good technique. I found that shooting at F11 gave me a softer image with the 7D due to the effects of diffraction so I now shoot at F8 with this lens and the 7D combo.

As the slightest whiff of a breeze makes the subject quickly depart the frame, I resorted to clamping the branch to the tripod which also gave me a better angle of the spiders. If I work slowly and ever so gently, the spider settles down although I sometimes have to gently twist the twig to slowly rotate the spider into view.

For a couple of the shots I managed to grab 3 to 5 frames for focus stacking with Helicon. Using the MP-E65 is much more technically demanding than the 100mm F2.8 and is more akin to long focal length auto guiding when compared to wide field imaging!

Thanks for looking!

Dennis
Attached Thumbnails
Click for full-size image (Canon 7D IMG_08342_Crop 800 A.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon 7D IMG_08342_Crop 800 B.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon EOS 7D - IMG_8263 Crop 800.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon EOS 7D - IMG_8305 Crop 800 A.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon 7D IMG_08372_Crop 800.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon EOS 7D - IMG_8382 FR Crop 800.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon EOS 7D - IMG_8419 800 Helicon.jpg)
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Click for full-size image (Canon EOS 7D - IMG_8426 800 Helicon.jpg)
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