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 current community chat Photography Photography Meta more communities Explore other Stack Exchange communities on stackexchange.com Stack Exchange This page is an archive of this blog, and is presented for historical purposes only. Pseudo-Macro Photography with a Telephoto Lens 2012-09-30 by jrista . 4 comments Macro photography is one of the all-time favorite pastimes of photographers. The enlargement of the small and microscopic to huge scale, the exploration of detail the naked eye cannot see. Sometimes it’s tough to decide what kind of photography to do on a day trip, when you can only carry so much gear. As a bird photographer, I tend to need large lenses and heavy gear, which makes lugging around a backpack full of additional gear impractical much of the time. Over the past year, I’ve come to enjoy a similar pastime that I call Telephoto Pseudo-Macro. Strictly speaking, macro photography involves the use of a macro lens, which is capable of projecting a scene at 1:1 magnification (100% scale) onto the sensor. This “life size” scale is why its called macro, as we live and exist in the world at macro scale…life scale. Anything less than a 1:1 magnification, and you actually have close-up photography. The kind of fine detail that true macro photography extracts from a subject is quickly lost as your magnification factor drops with shorter lenses, however with a telephoto lens, you can often get very close to a subject and magnify them enough to become “psuedo-macro”. Not quite life size, but large enough for fine detail to exhibit well. The benefits of using a telephoto lens for close-up “macro” photography work is two-fold. First is working distance, which can be several feet. This is great for photographing insects and other moving subjects that might take off if bothered. A long telephoto lens, such as a 500mm or 600mm lens, have relatively close minimum focus distances, and their narrow field of view will actually magnify your subject quite a bit on sensor. The second benefit is that you can use a teleconverter to gain even more focal length at the same minimum focus distance. A 300mm lens with an MFD of 4 feet with a 2x TC becomes a 600mm lens with the same 4 foot MFD. Your subject size grows in the frame by the ratio of the focal lengths squared, so in the this case, 300mm -> 600mm, your subject is 2.25x more magnified than before. Despite the greater subject distance, most prime telephoto lenses offer superior image quality, sharpness, color, etc. So even at a distance of several feet, you can still extract a lot of small features at incredible sharpness. Renting a high-end lens like the Canon L-series supertelephoto lenses or Nikon’s  G supertelephotos will offer the best sharpness in any lens with good working distances. Getting a lens that has some kind of image stabilization or vibration reduction is a huge plus for insect pseudo-macro photography. You can stop thinking about shot stability, and start composing your subject in-frame. With a fast telephoto lens and a good TC, you frequently have a maximum aperture of f/4 or f/5.6. This allows you to retain autofocus capability, which can be a godsend for chasing down fast-moving insects guzzling up flower nectar, or flora blowing in the wind. Another benefit of using a telephoto lens is the background blur, or bokeh.  At focal lengths beyond 100mm-200mm, noisy, cluttered background instantly blur into a creamy smooth backdrop for your key subject. So, the next time your out and about looking for wildlife or birds, keep an eye on the nearby flora and ground. A telephoto lens, with its thin DOF, can make an excellent tool for pseudo-macro photography. And when your out and about, don’t forget to look strait down! You never know what subjects you might find (and you might save yourself some prickly pain, too!) Filed under Guides, Tips, and Howtos , PhotoSE Gear Grant Tagged: boke , bokeh , flora , insect , Macro , pseudo , pseudo-macro , supertelephoto , teleconverter , telephoto 6 Tips for Wedding Second-Shooters by elendilthetall . 1 comments Like many serious amateur photographers, I have thought about making money from my hobby. Landscape and stock photography is super-saturated these days, and there’s not a great deal of money in it, so I decided to try my hand at wedding photography. It’s neither easy or advisable to jump straight into it, but I was lucky enough to have a friend of a friend who already had a few weddings under his belt who needed a second shooter, and so I jumped at the chance to help him out on a couple of occasions. In this post I’ll try and give you some tips based on my (admittedly limited) experiences. 1. Prepare for a LONG day At the first wedding I assisted on, I was tasked with shooting the groom’s preparations on my own first of all, before shooting the rest of the day, right up to the first dance, alongside the main photographer. This meant I started at 11am and finished around 10pm. It’s a long shift, but what makes it tiring is the fact that you are pretty much switched on all day. You need to be constantly on the lookout for photo opportunities, especially because as the second shooter you will often be in charge of capturing candid shots while the main photographer handles the posed ones. Lesson learned, for my second wedding I made sure to get an early night the night before, and to bring along some energy drinks and chocolate bars for a quick energy boost when needed throughout the day. 2. Consider renting a lens One of the biggest advantages of second shooting is that you get to build your portfolio while you gain experience. While the guy I was assisting had invested in a top-end 24-70mm 2.8 lens, I was only using my consumer level lenses. Now, I managed to get plenty of useable shots, but they all would have been much better with a pro level lens, and I’m sure I would have increased my proportion of decent shots as well, thanks to the faster shutter speeds afforded by an f2.8 maximum aperture. Since my second-shooting experiences, I have had the opportunity via Stack Exchange to use some pro-level lenses and the difference in image quality is astounding. I would absolutely not recommend buying such a lens (unless you’re really well-heeled) purely for dipping your toe into the wedding waters, but I would recommend renting. You can usually rent a lens for a weekend for next to nothing, and the benefits to your portfolio will be worth it and then some. The main photographer will also likely be much happier with the results as well. 3. Shoot duplicates – lots of duplicates Put your camera in continuous shooting mode and use it. When you’re shooting formal or posed portraits, the wedding party will be constantly distracted by family members out of frame. They’ll blink. Younger members of the wedding party will run around like headless chickens. Shots will get messed up. Take 3 or 4 of each shot and you increase your chances of getting the shot, or being able to create the shot in post by compositing shots together. 4. Invest in another battery and memory card If you haven’t already got them, you need a spare battery and memory card for shooting weddings. I was in two minds at first – hey, I’ve shot whole week-long vacations on one battery before now – but got a spare battery just in case for my first wedding shoot. And it was a good job I did: I burned through my first battery by the end of the formal shots. Constant shooting and writing to the card drains the battery so much quicker than the occasional snap on vacation. As for memory cards, you can never have enough. I shot 1600 shots at my first wedding, 1000 at my second (because I was following tip 3!). Capacity isn’t the only issue – what if a card fails? Spare cards are very affordable, so invest in a couple of extra ones and you’ll be good to go. 5. Be Adaptable Weddings are great occasions, but they are also pretty damn hectic, especially in the run up to the main event. As I mentioned...