 Ant on a blade of grass Intro by Skip Cohen It's Mirrorless Monday with a special guest post by one of my favorite people, the "mad scientist of imaging," Don Komarechka. Some of the most incredible images ever shared in the SCU blog have been thanks to Don, and over the years, even though we've still never managed to meet in person, our friendship has grown. Today's guest post is unique and remarkable because Don captured the image below with the new LUMIX S1R and without a macro lens. Thanks to his love for sharing and education, he takes us through each step of the process. The tagline for Panasonic's LUMIX family of cameras, "Changing Photography," has never been more accurate! Check out more of Don's work with a click on either image to link to his website, blog, and newest projects. And for more LUMIX images, meet the Ambassadors. They're a fantastic group of artists with an unmatched love for imaging, education, creativity, and mirrorless photography!
NEW! LUMIX S1R Kit, Digital Mirrorless Camera with 47.3MP MOS Full Frame, 24-105mm F4 L-Mount Lens Click on any thumbnail for more info Floral Muse by Don Komarechka
Our gardens are filled with Forget-Me-Nots, such a delicate and tiny string of flowers, so small that they would make a great companion to a water droplet. Walking around the flowers between rainstorms gave me the idea! This image is shot with a novel approach: using the high-resolution pixel shift mode on the Lumix S1R to create a 187MP image, and then cropping in on the central area of interest. This has a few benefits, one of them being that a macro lens is not required. This was shot with the Lumix S 24-105mm F/4 lens! No extra attachments, no extension tubes, just a high quality crop in from a very high resolution image. Another benefit is that shooting from farther away from your subject will yield a greater depth of field. Focus stacking an image such as this would normally take me around a dozen images, but only five were required here. The end result is an image around the 30 megapixel mark, so the crop is significant but even still I have more than enough detail to make large prints of this. The high resolution mode of the S1R takes multiple images, each with slight shifts to the sensor to create a final image with four times the resolution than the camera would normally have. This could be useful for a number of things like landscape photography, artwork reproduction or product photography, but macro photographers can benefit as well. Since the depth of field in your image becomes shallower as you get closer to your subject, intentionally being farther away with all other things being equal will increase the amount of depth you have over your subject. Sure, I’m throwing away a lot of pixels in the process, but it’s a valuable technique! The droplet was placed very carefully with a small gauge hypodermic needle, and it held on just long enough to take these images. The flower inside the refraction might appear to have a line running through it – this is actually the surface of the water with the flower half-way submerged, and you’re seeing the top of the flower reflected to mimic the full flower. The position of the forget-me-not flowers gives the droplet space, and the bottom blue flower is deliberately touching the surface of the water so that the surface tension creates a different angle to reflect more of the magenta petals of the gerbera daisy placed in behind. The entire scene is lit with a bright LED flashlight positioned over my right shoulder, continuous light being required for the high resolution mode. This is also one of the rare times you’ll find me using a tripod for this type of photography, because it is easier to find the right angle than hand-holding the camera. Different techniques require different equipment, and this high-resolution mode is a real winner! Skip's Note: All the secrets of water droplet refraction photography as well as most other aspects of macro imaging will be covered in Don's upcoming book Macro Photography: The Universe at Our Feet, currently being funded on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/donkom/macro-photography/ - if you’d like to support the project and help the book be an even better final product, you’ll also get a copy of the book in time for Christmas at a price much less than retail
1 Comment
DoogieHam
6/5/2020 01:57:43 am
I've pre-ordered Don's book via KickStarter and can't wait for it to come out so I can learn more about projects like this. Until then, I'm a bit confused when he states that he used focus stacking as well as the high resolution mode of the S1R. I didn't know that it was possible to use both of these functions of the S1R together and wouldn't the resulting uncropped image be over 500 mb if you could? Or did he take five high resolution images that were focused stacked manually and combine them? Any clarification would be helpful to me. I never thought about using the high resolution mode and the 24-105mm lens for macro photography so I'm anxious to try this out with my S1R. . Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
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