Playing around with macro lights

This weekend, while putting together a presentation on macro photography that I will do for the photography group at my work, I played around a bit with macro flash arrangements.  Macro lighting is often not considered by many beginning macro photographers - who spend the time working on whether to purchase a macro lens or diopters or extension tubes but wind up with macro shots that are dark or blurry.  Here’s an example of such a shot.

This, and all of the shots in this post, were taken with my MP-E 65 in 1x.  While my 180L is closer to being a “normal” macro lens, I have found that I need to light objects taken with my 180L much differently than those from my MP-E 65.  Since at 1x the MP-E 65 is close to being a standard 65mm macro lens, in this mode it is closer to the more popular 100mm macro lenses.

As you can see, the shot is very fuzzy.  I took this shot in aperture priority mode on the camera.  Obviously the shutter speed was not fast enough to compensate for hand holding the camera + lens.  When I metered the subject myself and chose a higher shutter speed the shot was completely black.  Now let’s discuss how I changed things to improve this shot of one of my kids’ Kinder Toys sitting on a plant.

The first thing I did was place a 580EX II on the camera’s hot shoe.  I placed a small soft box over it to diffuse the light.

This is obviously an improvement over the first shot, but note that there are strong shadows here - in particular under its chin.  The plan in the background is also very dark.  In addition, the shirt is a bit over blown.  This should be expected due to where the flash is coming from.  As the flash is coming from an angle overhead, some of it is being blocked by the lens itself.

Next, I used an off camera cord to place the flash with diffuser right above the lens and at an angle aiming down.

This is a bit better.  The shadows are still there, but are not as strong.  The shirt, however, is just as overblown or even more so.  In addition, the shiny spot on its head has become even brighter.  The background, though, is now better illuminated.  However, without a macro flash this is about the best I could do.  The other main problem with using this technique is, unless you have a macro flash bracket, you will need to hold the flash yourself which makes holding the camera and the flash together quite difficult.

The next example used the two headed macro flash MT-24EX.

Here I used the two heads on different sides with equal power.  The shirt is no longer as overexposed and the bright spot on the head is softer.  The background, however, is darker than before.  This is typical of the MT-24EX - which tends to illuminate the subject very well but leaves the background dark.  This is why shots taken with it so often show a subject on a black background.  This shot isn’t so bad, but let’s see if we can improve it.

This shot was also taken with the MT-24EX, but instead of mounting the heads directly onto the MT-24EX, I used a Wimberley macro flash bracket to place one of the lights overhead but slightly behind the figure.  The other light I placed on the right side of the lens.  Again the background is dark, but I have almost completely removed the reflection on the head.  The left side, however, is a bit dark because I moved the light that used to be aimed at it to overhead.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have three lights?  Too bad the MT-24EX only has two heads.  Well, there is technically a solution to this, and I decided to try it out.

In this case, I placed one head of the MT-24EX on the right of the lens - attached to the ring on the end of the lens.  I placed the other head on top, just behind the head using the Wimberley flash bracket.  This is the same setup as before.  I then added a 580EX II with a diffuser on the left side.  How did I do this?  I used Pocket Wizards to trigger the 580EX II.  Actually, since the MT-24EX needed to be attached to the camera, I used one PocketWizard to trigger the camera, another to trigger the flash, and another to use as a remote trigger.  Of course, this meant that I needed to hold both the camera and the trigger, which was a bit tricky.

While this technique does give the best results, I suspect it will only be practical in cases where I can have the camera on a tripod but I need to capture on object that doesn’t stay still.  Water drops seem to be a good example.

The above shot still could use some fine tuning, but the takeaway here is that macro lighting is similar to other types of lighting.  It follows the same rules and requires the same amount of attention.

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Tags: lighting, macro, mt-24ex, photography