Up Close with Nature

My longhorn beetle macro image was on the front cover of the May, 2010 Ukrainian Photographer Magazine. 20 pages worth of macro images in this issue. I wish our local magazine would do the same some day.

My blog - Up Close with Nature - has been featured in Ted's Beetles In The Bush, together with five other great blogs. I am really honored. Thanks, Ted. Ted C. MacRae is a research entomologist with an interest in beetle taxonomy and specializing in worldwide Buprestidae and Nearctic Cerambycidae and Cicindelidae. He is also the organizer of An Inordinate Fondness, the monthly blog carnival

In this post, we will talk about the use of Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) and EV (Exposure Compensation) in our Full Flash Macro Photography. But before we do that, we need to know what Full Flash photography and ETTL are. Full Flash is easy to explain. Take a look at my typical Full Flash Macro Photography setting: MT24EX on ETTL Mode, 40D on manual exposure mode: F11, 1/200, ISO100. At

This post is all about how to calculate/measure  macro magnification. It's really very simple but since I get asked this a lot, I might as well prepare a post on this for everyone's benefit. A lot of macro photographers add Raynox DCR250 and/or Extension Tubes and/or Teleconverter to their macro lenses (or non macro lenses) and wonder what magnification they are shooting at. Well, I say, shoot

In this post, I will be sharing a macro photography tip on why we always face problem capturing macro photo of some flash sensitive macro subjects, followed by a simple trick/solution on how we can overcome the problem by just switching our flash mode from ETTL to manual power. I am sure you have encountered a scenario like this before. You took a full flash shot ( or two ) of a flash (

This is another slr macro photography tip i picked up. I talked about Night Macro before and it's not really any different from day time macro. You'll definitely need a reasonably powerful flashlight/torchlight to get around, look for bugs/insects and to help in focusing. You will need help to shine the flash on the subject so you can focus and compose. However, if you have the Canon MT24EX Twin

Another SLR macro photography tip and also Photoshop post processing tips. Since we don't always get to choose the perfect background when shooting macro, or any other genre of photography, sometimes we just have to make use of digital photography software such as the Adobe Photoshop to enhance the background and/or other aspect of our macro shot. Since i normally prefer my macro images to have