Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/03/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The last time I did macro photography it was of mushrooms growing right on my front yard in amazing clusters. Fairly small shrumes like smaller than a quarter but in tight clusters a couple of feet across. This seems to happen every year so I am getting good it the particular problem. I put the long TTL flash cord on one of my Nikons and attached the other side to my SB 24 flash… I held the flash high over the mushrooms as I crouched down and shot them with my 105.28 macro glad it had a big fat lens shade. Pretty much standard of the industry for such a task although by now i expect Canon to have something at least as good so maybe that's the standard of the industry. And I'd expect our famous 100 macro to be quite a bit better. Which is why I expect to be using it someday. I shot this at dusk. The Nikon Syncs at 250th so that would not even have been a problem. I cropped in on them a few times quite close and I may have done the not so smart thing as stopped all the way down to f32 to see if i could get more than a razerblades width in focus. Out of focus pale mushrooms don't do much for me. I shot a roll or so. Then i went in the house and brought out my 135.3.4 apo and 90 apo Asph Summicron and my black ttl m6 body. Loaded the camera up with another roll of Delta 100. As i started composing similar pictures to what i'd just done with the Nikon but this time with frame lines and split image instead of ground glass. I found to my surprise that 90 percent of my "macro" shots id done with the 105 Nikon macro I'd done at magnifications repeatable with the Leica M and it's two lenses. Which i believe are similar to most other lenses except the wide's. The 75.1.4 goes a tad closer. So was able to redo pretty much all the so call macro shots I'd down tithe Nikon macro with my Leica m camera. That was not even my intent as it would not have occurred to me that would be so possible. My intent was to just get some shots composed further back. With more mushrooms in them. An overview or two. The moral of the story as I saw it was the Leica M camera gets in there tighter than you think. Don't underestimate it. It's operating darn close to the "macro" range which is tough to shoot in anyway. I like a flash. The shots never look like they were done with a flash. It goes off at 1/200,000 of a second at that range would that record bee's wings? Maybe not but you're not going to get camera or subject shake and you ARE going to be able to stop down! Oh I used the some cord and flash with the Leica and also in TTL mode. Gee it might have corrected for some minor bellows factor! Float like a butterfly sting like a bee! Mark Rabiner Portland, Oregon USA http://www.rabinergroup.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html