The tale of the spider, the macro lens, the diffuser and the Magic Lantern

So today, I had a delivery; a bit of velcro which allowed me to get my diffuser stuck back onto my flash. Got it all set up and had a quick run outside for another play with the new macro lens. One of the best results so far was this shot. I'm disappointed with the background leaf, but hey, I was just playing around and the little bugger scuttled off once I had taken this picture. He must have been about 3mm in size, so you can tell how good this lens is.

So the first thing I wanted to show you was the setup for this. It's pretty straightforward; effectively it's a softbox that you stick on your flashgun. For macro shots, this does two things

• Gives you awesome wrap-around lighting. I can also take the flash off and fire it remotely to get lighting from the side
• Really separates the subject from the background. If you shoot with natural light, everything in the frame exposes at the same level, so you get to see the background. This can make things look messy. With a pop of the flash, the subject is exposed to much more light than the background which causes the background to darken out.

---

So that's the hardware setup, but I also wanted to introduce you to something called Magic Lantern (https://www.magiclantern.fm/).

If you have a Canon SLR, the likelyhood is that you can install this updated firmware on your SD card and gain some cool features. There are too many to list on this post, but the one I found an absolute godsend for macro photography is the "Trap Focus" function. This allows you to half depress the shutter button and as soon as your target comes into focus, it fires the shutter. This makes it so easy to get sharp focus on a subject when you have a depth of field of a few mm. Just shift the focus ring slightly or move backwards or forwards and you never have to time your shutter firing. Absolutely brilliant

A couple more images from this evening's trial (I cant get over how sharp this lens is)

More macro images to follow soon once the insects start appearing :)

Thanks for reading!!

Mark