Honey bee visiting my garden.


This year I decided to plant wild flowers in a section of garden that I have recently developed.  Many of the plants are in full bloom at the moment and the time seemed right to put my macro equipment together and take a few photos.  I am quite happy with this one.

I am using a 30 mm auto extension tube on a Nikon D7100 camera sporting a Nikkor 105 mm macro (Micronikkor) f/2.8 D lens set to manual focus.  I also have three R200 macro flashes attached to the ring on the end of the lens that are wirelessly connected to the camera for TTL metering.

When shooting macro I keep the shutter speed set to 1/250 (flash synch speed) and the aperture set to its smallest size (f/36 without Nikon's adjustment or f/57 with).  Shooting in Raw exposure mode lets me play with the exposure and extract details that would otherwise be lost.  My ISO was set to 200; this keeps the noise low but makes it so the flashes have to do 70% less work.

The image below shows the uncropped photo - you can see that I managed to get very close.  Although I usually do cropping in my macro shots, I find that the more optical magnification I can get the less zooming in post I have to do and the resulting shot has more detail.

I took about 40 pictures as I meandered around my garden.  Although there were lots of desired shots I didn't get, there were plenty that I did.  I hope to do more of the same in the next few days and see what sorts of amazing things I can find.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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