Outstanding macros - the level of detail you are getting in all of these is phenomenal.
Wow! Awesome work Nick! The details in the bee is so incredible, it's like I want to take a brush and brush it's hair for it.
You would never know it was windy at all for you with such sharp photos. I think for your first outing you really scored here.
Thanks both.
I hope this won't be inappropriately detailed, and forgive me if you know all this already, but ....
As to sharpness, in breezy conditions it is true that it is difficult to get the focus plane where you want it, and with small subjects the focus plane needs to be placed with a fair degree of precision to get images that are sharp where it matters. Subject movement coupled with hand-shake movement means there is a significant random element as to where the focus falls, the more so as the subjects get smaller. That is why I keep shooting a subject as long as it stays in view, so as to increase the chance of finding shots that worked when I trawl through the often 400 to 600 shots from a typical 90 minute or so session (all single captures - no bursts).
As to the sharpness when the focus plane does fall in the right place, subject and hand movement don't affect sharpness much because I use flash and so the effective shutter speed is the flash duration. My crude measurements suggest that with the 1/4 flash power that I use most of the time the flash duration is somewhere between 1/1000 and 1/2000 sec, and that seems to be fast enough even for the higher magnifications I use which are most sensitive to subject and camera movement .
As to detail, this is where things get complicated. If you have clicked through to Flickr you may have noticed two things. One is that I'm using very small apertures. The second is that the images were uploaded to Flickr at 1300 pixels high. These two things are related.
As to aperture, the first three used f/45 and the other two f/40. That is what was set on the camera/lens. (The lens goes from f/2.8 to f/22, but using a pair of 2X teleconverters changes that to f/11 to f/90, which is why I can set it to f/45.)
The actual apertures I used were smaller than that, quite likely f/90 or smaller for the bee and f/300 or so for the smaller subjects. That is because the effective aperture depends on the magnification. It can be approximated using the formula
Effective f-number = Nominal f-number * ( 1 + magnification )
where
Nominal f-number is the one you set on the camera/lens and
Effective f-number is the one you are actually using.
I don't recall what the magnifications were, but let's suppose the magnification for the bee was 1:1. That would turn the f/45 that I set on the camera/lens into
f / ( 45 * ( 1 + 1) ) = f/90
In fact, the magnification was probably a bit more than that so the effective aperture would have been smaller than f/90.
It is quite likely that the other three used a magnification of around 6X. If so f/45 would become
f / 45 * ( 1 + 6 ) = around f/300
Now, we all know that diffraction softening gets worse as the aperture gets smaller. And with the size of aperture I'm using it gets a
lot worse. For example, here is one of the images from my first post in this forum.
1865 036 1851 06 2020_12_19 DSC08627_PLab4 LR 1300h DNAIcMedHi by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
This used f/45 and in this case I'm fairly sure the magnification was around 6X, so an effective aperture of around f/300. You can see from the following illustration just how bad the diffraction softening is with such small apertures. At the bottom left we see the central part of the processed image at 100% (that is 100% of the 1300 pixel high image at Flickr, not 100% of the captured image, which was 4000 pixels high). At the bottom right we see what that central area would have looked like in an out of the camera JPEG (it is the JPEG embedded in the raw file, which looks exactly the same as an out of the camera JPEG). As you can see, especially if you click through to Flickr and go to the full size screenshot, the original is very severely lacking in visible detail. Basically, diffraction smears out fine detail, and the smaller the aperture the larger the scale of the detail that gets smeared out.
1867 1 A7ii+2x2+100atF300ish processed vs OOC by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
I had to use a lot of processing power and several pieces of clever software to produce something more usable than the captured image. It is about on the outer edge of what I can get out of these images, and that is one of the reasons they are restricted to 1300 pixels high - there isn't enough detail to go any larger; it just makes the image look worse. (It varies from image to image, and depends on capture magnification and image cropping, but this gives the general idea.)
So how is it that these images appear to have a lot of detail? (I do get told that about my invertebrate images from time to time.) I think the answer is twofold. One aspect of it is that restricting the output size so pixel peeping isn't possible (as I'm sure it is with for example your landscape images) means that the fact that a lot of the detail has been washed out is hidden from view. The other thing, and the reason I use such small apertures, is that the depth of field is much larger than it would otherwise be. It seems that to many people including me (but not everyone) an image of something like an insect that has a large depth of field looks more detailed overall than an image with much narrower depth of field, even though the areas of the narrow DOF image that are in focus have finer detail than anything in the wide DOF image. For example, I think a lot of people would see the f/22 version below as being sharper and having more detail than the f/5.6 version, even though the f/5.6 version is much nearer the optical optimum for the lens and not suffering from diffraction softening to anything like the extent the f/22 version is.
0711-01-Panasonic-G3-+-45-200-at-200mm-+-Raynox-250,-F5.6-flipF22 by
gardenersassistant, on Flickr
Until the middle of last year I used effective apertures equivalent to around f/45 on full frame. That was the smallest aperture I could get using close-up lenses on telezoom lenses, which is what I used for invertebrates until then, so now I'm using kit that lets me use smaller effective apertures I can get greater depth of field (at the cost of even softer images with even less fine detail in them). Depth of field roughly doubles for each two stops reduction in aperture and I'm now getting from something like twice to eight times the depth of field I was previously.
Of course, you can get both a large depth of field and a lot of fine detail by using focus stacking, combining images captured with sweet spot apertures so as to get the best of both worlds, sharpness/detail and depth of field. However, the subject (and what it is on) need to stay sufficiently still for sufficiently long while the sequence of images is captured. For me that is not so practical, shooting out of doors and living as I do in a breezy location and often photographing insects etc on foliage that is moving in the breeze, and liking to photograph little animals as they move around, and little animals that when they do stay still may only stay still for very brief periods. Focus stacking can produce wonderful images, but it is not a technique that I have used much for invertebrates.
