2024 08 - August B

Content warning: Arachnophobia
The last set of images is all spiders. If you're going through the galleries "full screen", you won't get shown big versions of the spider images unless you explicitly click on their thumbnails. The gallery with spiders in is preceded by the heading SPIDERS.

"Macro-Test Month"

Despite doing a bunch of small projects, some pre-existing freelance work and having a couple of larger things I'm procrastinating over... Apparently that wasn't enough. Cue: the latest micro-obssession - doing more macro, again, but bigger.

"Bigger" macro? Yes! Well. Instead of making smaller things things look bigger like with regular macro, I wanted to make even smaller things look even bigger.

I took the opportunity to test the Kenko extension tube set I got for a ridiculously low price last year. One image of those below (caution: it's in the spider gallery) was taken with the full 68mm extension stack, but there was such a large amount of haze with that setup I decided to give up on that and stick with the "modest" 56mm stack. With the Tamron 90mm Di 1:1 Macro lens, this gives me a 1.75x magnification (as opposed to the Tamron's original 1x). Unfortunately, I found that trying this without either a flash or macro lens that doesn't focus breathe made it quite difficult to get decent images of anything that wasn't completely still.

(The large apertures needed also show that my sensor is in desperate need of a clean)

With only a few days of annual leave left I bought a used Nissin Di700A flash (I have never used a flash in my life) and set about finding (or designing) a 3D-printed diffuser hood (I have never used a diffuser hood in my life).

Tamron 90mm + 56mm stack

Tamron 90mm + 56mm stack + Nissin flash

The flash, overall, is very usable. It does take a while to charge sometimes so I have to be more careful with when I press the shutter button than usual, but using it in its TTL mode means I only really have to worry about that and what level of power I want it to give out.

If the tests I've done over the past couple of days say anything, it's that I need practice. Other than that, it's that yes, I need a diffuser if I want to be able to pull off anything like those nice insect macro shots I've seen about.

So then. Next step: make a diffuser. I'm probably going to try borrowing a lot from Allan Walls' design, but potentially making it out of different materials (both The Range and B&Q sell the EVA foam mats on their online marketplaces... Through the same third-party seller. Because of course they do).

SPIDERS

I like spiders, and there are lots of spiders around. Good match-up? I like to think so. For the images below, "1x" will refer to the Tamron 90mm by itself, "1.75x" will refer to it plus the 56mm stack, and "??x" will refer to the full 90mm + 68mm stack because I forgot to take a reference shot for magnification measurement. A prefix of "FL" says "flash was used".