Macro Photography

Taking close-up pictures of small things is called "macro photography." I have no idea why. Perhaps because the small things in macro photography are generally larger than the things you are taking pictures of when doing "micro photography". If you really want to be pedantic then you should say you are doing "photomacrography".

What Kind of Camera

Point and shoot digital cameras can have remarkable macro capabilities, but for best results you want a single-lens reflex camera. These allow you to attach special-purpose macro lenses and show you in a bright optical viewfinder what you will get on the sensor.
A typical setup might be a Canon Digital Rebel XTi  with a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM . This lens is designed for the small-sensor Canon cameras and gives a working distance equivalent to 100mm on a full-frame photo camera. The lens is specified to focus down to "1:1" or "life size". This means that the smallest object you can photograph that will extend to the corners of the final digital photo will be the same size as the sensor inside the Canon Rebel camera, 15x22mm. A professional photographer might use Canon EOS 5D  and a lens designed for full Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM. Confusingly, this lens is also specified to focus down to "1:1", but this time the sensor is 24x36mm in size, the old 35mm film standard. So you can't take a photo of something quite as small as with the cheaper equipment.
In the film world, the 35mm photo camera systems had comprehensive range of macro lenses and accessories and some medium format systems, such as the Rollei 6008 would have at least a few lenses and extension tubes. Only the extremely patient ever did macro photography with a 4x5 inch view photo camera.

Close-Up Lenses

Your eyes don't focus so great on really small things either. Do you try to pull your cornea a foot away from your retina? No. You stick a magnifying glass in front of your cornea. You can do the same thing for your normal lens. Unlike your cornea, it even has convenient threads for attaching a magnifying glass. The magnifying glass screws into the same place where a filter would go.



Macro Lenses

The best macro lenses are the latest autofocus mount models made by Canon and Nikon, typically in focal lengths ranging from 50 to 200mm. Each lens will focus continuously from infinity to 1:1. You can shoot the moon and capture the bear claw without stopping to change lenses or screw in filters. How do these lenses work? Do they just have a much longer helical than the 50mm normal lens? Yes and no.

 

Macro Zoom Lenses

Macro zoom lenses are not macro lenses. They don't allow significantly greater magnification than a 30mm or 50mm normal lens and they deliver low quality.


Exposure

Unless you are using close-up lenses, when doing any kind of macro work, you always have to consider the effective f-stop. Even if you are using the SLR body's built-in meter, which will correct automatically for light loss, you can't turn off your brain. Why not? Because the effective aperture affects picture quality.
Taking pictures through a pinhole results in tremendous depth of field but very low sharpness due to diffraction. This is why lenses for a 35mm film camera stop at f/22 and don't go to f/45 or f/64. Large format camera lenses provide these smaller apertures for two reasons: (1) the lenses are longer (f/64 on a 210mm lens is not all that small a hole); (2) the negative won't be enlarged very much.
If you're at 1:1 and have selected f/22 on the macro lens barrel, you need to look at the lens markings and/or the close-up exposure dial in the Kodak Professional Photoguide to learn that your effective aperture is f/45.
If you're using a handheld meter, you absolutely must use these corrections (e.g., meter says f/22 but you're focussed down to 1:1 so you set f/11 on the lens barrel).

Lighting

A good quick and dirty lighting technique is to use a through-the-lens (TTL) metered flash with a dedicated extension cord). A modern handheld flash is extremely powerful when used a few inches from a macro subject. That lets you stop down to f/16 and smaller for good depth of field. You can hold the flash to one side of the subject and have an assistant hold a white piece of paper on the other side to serve as a reflector. If you want a softer light, you will have enough power in the flash to use almost any kind of diffusion material. The TTL meter in the camera will turn the flash off when enough light has reached the sensor.
Lighting is the most important and creative part of any kind of photography.

Focus

With a depth of field of around one millimeter for precise macro work, camera positioning and focus become critical. If you have a good tripod and head, you'll find that you have at least 10 controls to adjust. Each of them will move the camera. None of them will move the camera along the axis that you care about.
That's why people buy macro focusing rails, e.g., Adorama Macro Focusing Rail . These are little rack and pinions capable of moving the entire camera/lens assembly forward and back. You use the tripod to roughly position the camera/lens and then the macro rail to do fine positioning.
The photos below are snapshots from the garden of the Getty Center. They were taken with a fancy Canon EF 180mm f3.5L Macro USM , but without a tripod.

Macro Photo Gallery

 information from photo.net

Infrared Photography

Exposure setting 

All digital cameras I know measure the light through the lens. While this means that the light reaching the metering sensors is already filtered to IR only, there is still dependency on camera type: most non-SLRs use the CCD itself to evaluate the exposure, while current SLRs have dedicated metering sensors for which some of the light used for viewing is diverted.

This distinction is quite meaningful. It means that in non-SLR you can usually trust the exposure automation — as long as the metering system is capable of doing its job at very low light levels. It should be: a typical IR exposure with the R72 filter corresponds to exposure value of EV 3, while most cameras can cope with EV zero or close. Even so, however, you will be probably better off applying a negative exposure compensation, usually close to -1 EV, to avoid red channel overload, described below.

In SLRs, a separate light sensor does the metering; its sensitivity to the IR may be entirely different than that of the CCD imager (with any IR-blocking filters in front of one or the other accounted for); therefore you may have to apply a significant exposure compensation to get things right. A few test shots should be enough to establish the value appropriate for a particular camera. For example, in bright sunlight I can quite reliably shoot IR with the Olympus E-510 in the autoexposure mode, but I have to apply a +5 EV compensation.

Red channel overload. When setting the exposure compensation (SLR or not), you have to aim for a picture which will look like it is underexposed, too dark. This is because practically whole image information goes into just one of the RGB components: red, and you have to keep that component from saturation (i.e., running out of range). If your camera can display a brightness histogram for individual RGB components, make sure that the red one does not hit the upper limit. Otherwise use -1 EV or so of negative exposure compensation, adjusting this correction as you learn your camera/filter combination. 

Your exposures will be quite long: an IR filter combined with the camera's anti-IR one will let through less than 0.1% of the incoming light. A bright scene, requiring 1/500 s at F/8 in visible light will need about 1 s or longer at F/4 on most cameras. Not only this asks for using a tripod, but, if the air is not quite still, there will be a blur in the foliage, grass, water reflections, etc. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may add an extra feel to the image.  

Fogging

Certain cameras or lenses may exhibit some fogging, or image areas with extra exposure . This may be due to light scattered from inner surfaces of the lens, or to some peculiarities of anti-reflective lens coating which was not really designed for infrared. Sometimes the blackness of internal surfaces of the lens tube or mirror chamber may be "not black enough" in infrared.

Sometimes it happens to all cameras of a given model, sometimes — just to a particular specimen or a particular lens. Camera makers are not worried about this: very few users ever venture into the IR realm, and this is a mass market after all. There is no way to avoid this problem; once again, check an IR filter on your camera/lens combination before buying.

Note to SLR users: regardless of that effect, the image may be fogged, or otherwise affected, by the light entering through the viewfinder in spite of the raised mirror) and reaching the sensor after being scattered around the mirror chamber. To avoid that, close the eyepiece shutter before the exposure, or use the included eyepiece cover (or, at the very least, shield the eyepiece with your hand or hat). Users of non-SLR cameras, obviously, do not have to worry about this

Focusing

The focal length of your lens (and therefore the proper focus setting) depends on the wavelength. Lens makers try to keep that dependency to a minimum (achromatic lenses), but only within the visible light spectrum. A lens focused in visible light will be somewhat off-focus in infrared. Many film-era lenses had a separate focus marker on the barrel, to be used in infrared photography.

With autofocus, like with autoexposure, the outcome depends on the type of camera, although the difference is not as drastic. (Remember, we are talking about non-modified cameras here, where an IR filter is used on the lens.)

Non-SLR cameras have an easier job here. Autofocus is performed in the image sensor plane, by contrast detection. This means the circuitry will properly detect when the image is in focus, regardless of the light type. There may be a problem with the amount of light available for the job, but not with its kind; the AF action may be slower and less reliable, but there will be no systematic shift. If your camera is capable of autofocusing in low light down to EV 0 or not much above, you'll be just fine. Sort of.

Just in case, I would recommend taking more than one picture, every time forcing the camera to re-focus. This will increase your chances of getting at least one properly focused image.

In SLRs the AF is done by dedicated sensors behind a system of mirrors. These sensors are at the same effective distance from the lens as the imager. This should, in principle, work OK, as both the AF sensors and the imager are getting infrared light only. There may be, however, some inaccuracy caused by the fact that both sensors are receiving somewhat different kind of infrared (remember the anti-IR filter on top of the imager!), so both focus planes will be shifted with respect to each other: what the AF sensor will see as in focus, the imager may see somewhat out-of-focus.

The difference is not as large as the one between visible and IR light, so we just have to live with this (IR-adapted cameras, without a filter on the lens, face much more of a problem here). Just in case, stepping the lens down for more depth of field, is a reasonable precaution.

Some SLRs with the Live View feature offer an additional AF-by-imager mode. In that case, the system works exactly as in a non-SLR camera, just fine — as long as the camera does not do the final focusing, just before opening the shutter, using the "regular" AF sensors.

Manual focusing by scale is not really useful here, although with a bit of patience you may find the right setting for a given lens used for landscape shooting. If in doubt, try setting focus a little closer than the actual subject distance: at the equivalent focal length of 50 mm use about 4-5 m instead of infinity — but this actually depends on the particular lens.

Depth of field may, to a large extent, help masking the lack of proper focus. In case of problems, try to use wide zoom settings and shoot in aperture priority at F/8 or so; this may help.

You can run but you can't hide: at small apertures (large F-numbers) the image resolution is negatively affected by diffraction effects. This effect is more visible (i.e., starts at larger apertures) in infrared. Its magnitude depends on the ratio of the (absolute) aperture size to the average wavelength of light used for the image. That wavelength is about 50% more for near-infrared than for visible light (850 nm or so versus 550 nm; remember that IR wavelength is limited by the anti-IR filter), hence the difference in usable apertures will be about one F-stop, maybe a bit more. This means that if you could  use apertures up to F/11 in visible light (with a given lens), in infrared the limit will be F/8 or F/7. Still, it is often easier to live with diffraction than with an out-of-focus image.

While smaller imagers suffer from this at lower F-numbers, they also show more depth of field; both effects exactly compensate each other. 

Infrared Photo gallery

information from wrotniak.net

Nikon MILLENNIUM limited

Nikon rangefinder S3 2000 ("Y2K") model

Amidst taking off in the digital imaging sector in SLR and P&S market as well as an upgrade of LEICA M6 TTL which has brought TTL flash to their evergreen line of M6 series, not many people would had the slightest imagination to relate the Japanese camera which had found its recognition in the photographic equipment market via their S-mount rangefinder series cameras back in the '50 would reintroduce a remake of the old time classic. Yes. indeed it had stunned many observers and sprung surprises to Nikon enthusiasts worldwide when it was released in February, 2000 with the original intention of 2000 limited edition units for Year 2000. The "idea" was so well received that before it was officially shipped that back order was already piling up domestically as well as international request that eventually it had exceeded the original target production unit of 2000 units.

I guess the last two generation of Nikon users probably had no idea what and how the Nikon rangefinder era was. You may just browse around in a simplest way to get an idea in the sequential events via the pages of the pictorial history. Basically, the Nikon S3 (1958~1967) was a simplified version based on the professional grade Nikon SP, where some selected features in the Nikon SP had been removed. The bright line frames in the S3 was not switchable but there were three fixed frame lines for popular focal length such as 35mm, 50mm and 105mm (the SP offers extended range of 28~135mm*). The S3 can / will accept / share the many accessories designed for the SP such as S36, S250 Motor Drives etc. Two known versions of the Nikon S3 exist, one with cloth shutter and another with a Titanium shutter curtain. Besides, there was a special edition which was being produced to commemorate the XVIII Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in 1964 - a few years after its discontinuation. Approx. 14,000 of the Nikon S3 were being produced throughout its entire product cycle. In the market place, the S3 was Nikon direct answer to the highly successful continuation of the Leica M3 single stroke models as well as Contax II/III.

Nikon had also took the opportunity to refine some minor areas in the S3 remake model's external appearance but none are significant to conclude it is a new model. There are a few which deserve a mention. The film reminder has been corrected as 24 or 36 instead of 20/36 as used on the original S3; the film advance lever has been improved. The serial number which was intended to separate the new and original has been re-categorized with a starting S/N S3 20xxxx to as high as 21xxxx for chrome; S3 30xxxx for black paint version. There are some change in the choice of materials at non critical areas such as neck strap eyelet are using stainless steel now (from brass) and the finishing metallic coating is just chromed instead of the old nickel chrome. The old "Nippon Kogaku TOKYO" logo was retained, if not it would have been degrading its original intentive purpose.

Along with the release. Nikon had also tailored produced a matching Nikkor-S 1:1.4 f=50mm standard lens for the camera. Naturally, older original RF-Nikkor lenses can still be used on this new S3. As one can recall, the last RF 50/1.4 was the Olympic black in 1964 where it makes a great companion along with the original Nikon S3 black paint. The new Y2K RF-50mm f/1.4 Nikkor-S here has some similarity but internally, it has been redesigned with a new composition bearing 7 elements in 5 groups optical construction and weighs overall just only 175g. The lens has a starting S/N that begin with 20xxxxx, since the last of the Black 50/1.4 Olympic used 14xxxxx, it shouldn't be easily mixed with the reissued Nikkor-S 1.4/50mm.

Focusing scales: Unified to meters (m) scales from the original; distance range ring uses dual scales units, in m and ft
Automated frame counter dial: numeric has changed to a new “ 24” from “ 20” used in original S3
Film Sensitivity Dial: changed to ISO from older ASA
Strap lugs: Materials were changed to stainless steel from brass, and to chrome finish from nickel-chrome finish.
Film rewind crank: Slightly changed in its external design
Film rewind knob: Slightly changed in its external design  

Lens: Nikkor-S 1:1.4 f=50mm Black. “Nikon” and “MADE IN JAPAN” inscribed, and multi-coating on the lens surfaces
Lens Cap: Changed to aluminum from plastic (with “Nikon” word inscribed on the back section)
Lens hood: Pitch 0.75 mm, “Nikon” inscribed 

source mir.com.my