Monday, 30-Jan-12 21:44:00 CET

Daffodils Macro

I already told the story about when I bought the camera but I have not told the entire story. There is a sequel. When I bought the camera I was a little bit too enthusiastic when hanging out in the web shop. I made one of those split second decisions that maybe were not so well figured out.

Namely, I added a close up filter lens set to fit on the 55 – 300 zoom. The reason for doing this was foolish. When I added the close up lens set I had not figured out how to use such things properly. I had some vague idea of multiplying the zoom effect of the lens. Later I figured out that these things indeed exist but then it is called a “tele-converter”. Anyway, it was in the reach of my budget and I thought it was a clever idea so I in the final minutes of ordering the camera I added that close up set. There was some formula to calculate the focal point but I did not make time to do this or research any further.

When the camera had arrived I tried out the lens set it did not work as I had anticipated. I got really disappointed. I tried to forget about this close up lens set failure.

Yesterday I was surfing the Internet. Just for the fun of it I went to Amazon and searched around for books about photography. There was this “look inside” feature of a photo book with tips and tricks. One section of the book was about how to maximize the sharpness of photos but that you chapter you could not look inside. The next chapter was about macro photography. First they displayed a real macro lens. In a tips and tricks section they mentioned in the book that if you have a tele zoom lens then it could be nice to try a set of close up filters so that you can make macro photo’s in a cheap way without having to buy a special macro lens and it is easy to carry around too. This tip literally hit me in the head.

So I bought no book. Instead I went searching for the close up filter set. Mounted then things and tried again. The subject for my experiment was daffodils. It looked really nice.

From one thing to another I was thinking that it would be great with a daffodil with light coming out from the flower. To achieve this I took sheet of cardboard and made hole for the stem. Then I placed the flash under the cardboard so that the light would come up through the whole and make it look like the light came from inside the flower.

Thanks Amazon for the look inside feature!