Look Closer: Changing Ordinary Subjects into Macro Photos with Joey Terrill | OPTIC 2021

hi i'm joey terrell professional photographer and nikon ambassador welcome to my macro studio i want to talk to you today about macro photography and all the amazing things that you can do with it so why don't we just jump right into it and look at some pictures and talk about some techniques that might help you to try some of this on your own [Music] so one of my favorite things to do is search around my house my studio and find things that are you wouldn't normally think of as a subject for a photograph this is a good example this is a coffee filter it's and i've all i've really done is i've used a kind of a colorful background to reflect into the coffee filter make an interesting picture this is something a little different this is a dragonfly wing and it's magnified to about 5x uh five times life size which is kind of a special technique but it just goes to show what you can what you can do when you move in close this is a good example of using light in a very controlled way obviously there's light behind it coming through the petals there's also a light that's that's like a spotlight that's right in the middle of the rose to bring out that center portion but it's a good example of using light kind of in in different areas of the frame so that you draw the viewer's interest into into only part of it um i grabbed an old piece of stone and a leaf and just sort of rake the light across the leaf in kind of a very very late afternoon kind of a feel and i mixed warm light with cool light you'll notice that the the stone that the leaf is sitting on kind of has a little bit of a cool tone to it and then the leaf itself is a little bit warmer and that's just an example of mixing a couple different colors of light together to kind of create a little bit of a mood and it's kind of the same thing here what i've done is i've changed the white balance setting on the camera to 3200 degrees by doing that it makes everything go blue but if you add a correct color of light to that meaning all the flowers have are being lit by normal daylight color like a speed light kind of a light and what happens is if you set it set the camera to 3200 when you do that everything turns blue but if you use one of the speed lights in such a way where it's the correct color meaning you filter that speed light for the setting that you've got set up on the camera you end up with a correct color flower and that's what we have here this was really fun what i did is i took an led panel and i just put some colored gels on the led panel and then set the whole thing on lazy susan and spun it back and forth back and forth i think the exposure was about five seconds and the idea was is by hesitating at one end of the spin you get the dot and that gives you the feeling of a direction to the spin of the lights this is an example of a couple things controlled lighting where you're only really lighting parts of the petals and not the entire flower and then the other part of it is is i'm using focus stacking here something i'm going to be talking about in just a little bit and describing in detail how you do it techniques and all of that but we'll get to that in a few minutes but this is just an example of placing the focus exactly where you want it and only where you want it this is a cocktail strainer sitting on a piece of plexiglas and so you see the the cocktail strainer reflected in the plexiglas but it's also an example of using different colored lights to bring out different parts of a a very common uh everyday household item this is a an antique of mine this is a 100 year old light meter and i just had some fun with it by lighting the edge of it with a little bit of a blue gel and then really narrowing down the beam of light that's hitting the uh the numbers themselves so you have kind of a tone of light to sort of a little darker and then the blue tone and then the background's a little something different just to give the feeling of depth um so it doesn't feel quite so two-dimensional just a box of pencils that i picked up at a local art store and kind of arrange them and again really careful with the lighting making sure that only part of the pencils are illuminated you'll notice the highlight on the part of the pencil that is not sharpened that's a light slightly below them and you need that little highlight otherwise that all goes very very dark a very simple picture really all this is it's a bit of wrapping paper kind of a iridescent wrapping paper and just by hitting it with the light we got all these very interesting patterns and colors that weren't there if you were just looking at it you wouldn't see it like this but with the macro lens you end up with kind of kind of really fun results digging into my kitchen drawers this is a kitchen whisk uh just shot from the top and i played with the uh the aperture so that only one part of the tips of the uh of the whisk were sharp and so the rest of it kind of goes out of focus you'll notice that it really goes out of focus at certain points and it kind of gives the feeling of of it almost like expanding or exploding or even moving speaking of moving this is the inside of a dryer hose just stuck the lens right inside the dryer hose and put a light at the other end of it and shot directly into the light and this is what happened this is kind of an interesting technique what's going on here is again similar to the other the cocktail glass where we had the long shadows it's the same kind of light 25 30 35 feet away and that's how you get those long distinct shadows is by having a source very small and far away from the subject that created the shadow but then i added a second light and i added a like a turquoise gel to it and what that did is by just turning the power up a little bit a little bit more a little bit more until it filled the shadow just enough we could see that blue color if i went too far what would happen is the rose light that's lighting that are lighting the glasses and casting the shadow they would mix and i'd get a a different color but by just turning the power up on the on the second light the turquoise one we end up with this so what i'd like to talk about now is uh something called focus stacking and it's it's actually very very simple to do and it's really simple to do now primarily because uh modern cameras some modern cameras actually now have this built into it and so it's it you can do things with it that you just can't do any other way [Music] so this is just some eucalyptus uh eucalyptus leaves by stacking them you end up with everything absolutely tack sharp and you can see at the bottom it's it's approximately life size and there's uh you know about 35 captures in there butterfly wing same thing and the same thing with the light is where we're really trying to pull out the texture and color and detail of that wing a flower that would look entirely different if it were not for focus stacking and very controlled lighting as well i mean this is to me i look at this picture and it's just every last part of it is tack sharp and the only way you can pull this off is through focus stacking again the same thing common dandelion i just grabbed it out of out of my yard uh made it look so as though it were you know towering over us you know a colorful background but the focus stacking is really what makes every part of it sharp controlled lighting on the background and on the subject itself and focus stacking to keep it all sharp this is a tiny little macaw feather it's much smaller than it probably seems it's about the size of my pinky and it's tipping away which is why there's 200 captures but by by doing the focus stacking and some lighting there to to really bring out the lines of the feather i mean you just see every last detail it's like hyper real in that you see just every last detail of this flower and talk about hyper real seen in a way that even with the naked eye you just can't see this kind of thing so focus stacking is something that it allows you to combine a bunch of images together and you end up with everything being sharp and when you move in really close this is five times life size this is a butterfly wing and you see the the scales there they're just absolutely gorgeous and you could just never see this with the naked eye but focus stacking helps to see it and helps to show it to your viewer and if you get into really high magnification this is 10 times life size that's what those scales look like really really close it almost reminds me of like ribbon candy it's just so beautiful [Applause] let me talk a little bit about the difference between focus stacking and depth of field one of the most common things that people ask me is well you know why would i want to do focus stacking i can just stop the lens down and i always say that they're very different depth of field has a single plane of focus there's really only one part of of any image that's really really sharp the rest of it you're just sort of perceiving sharpness you also have like minimal control you can't control really where the focus begins and ends because you know when you stop the lens down there's a given range like i say of there's only one spot that's really sharp and then the rest of it just sort of slowly but surely goes into less and less perceived sharpness and then the other thing is is that no lens performs really well when you stop the lens all the way down there's a generally it's in the middle of the range of the lens somewhere between five six and 11 that the lens performs at its best and uh you know when you go down to something like 22 32 45 the lens really isn't going to perform the way it's it's designed to perform so if you move into focus stacking you have multiple planes of focus which means from the nearest part to the farthest part is going to be sharp because the lens is focusing on each part of like in this case that leaf and so you have precise control over what you want to have in focus in this case i wanted the leaf to be sharp but i didn't want the background to be sharp so i stopped the focus uh as soon as i got to the the tip of the leaf which is the furthest point away and by doing focus stacking you're really getting the lens to perform at its optimum because in you're you're doing it at like i said five six eight eleven rather than trying to get it all sharp at at say 22 32 or 45. so let me illustrate this a little bit it is a common tooth brush and what i've done is i've i've uh i've obviously illuminated the toothbrush i've got a background what i want you to do when as i go through this you'll be able to see how much of the toothbrush is sharp as we go along but also what's happening in the background so we go from four to five six not a really big change as you go to eight you see the background comes into much more focus and also we we start to see that the the toothbrush is becoming maybe a little bit sharper at 11 a lot more background is now in focus but we still don't have all those bristles sharp at 16 now the background is almost at least to my eye it's beginning to fight with that toothbrush meaning the the background to me is sort of competing for my attention with the toothbrush and i want the toothbrush to stand out now it really is at 22 and i still don't have all the bristles sharp at 32 that background what what to me was really pleasant earlier now is no longer pleasant it's sort of a you know what i want to know what's going on back there and i still don't have all the bristles sharp and even at 45 i don't have all the bristles sharp and the background to me is very i don't know it's just objectionable so for me f11 is the optimal aperture for not for the background for sure but it also is where the lens that i'm shooting with performs very well so that's where i want to shoot um for the background but also for the lens so here's an example of that same image focus stacked so it's 71 captures at f11 and i've got the best of both worlds here i've got every bristle tack sharp and i have the background exactly as i want it to look so there's really hopefully you can see from that illustration there's no real other way to do it if you want to main total control maintain total control from front to back so some of the things you need for basic stacking a digital camera a quality lens obviously a tripod now you can focus stack without a tripod but any movement really introduces all kinds of problems into the stacking process and i'll explain how the stacking process works in a just a second but so you want if you can you want to have the have the camera on a tripod now you can manually focus in focus stacking um one other thing most people when they're thinking about focus stacking are thinking about doing it for something like macro work which is the most common place that you would do it but you can also do it even with a wide angle lens and even for landscape photography so for example let's say that you have a flower in the foreground and a rock in the middle ground and this big giant mountain off in the distance and you you want to hold everything in tack sharp focus you can focus stack now it may only need seven seven captures to stack together but it still works the same way it's the exact same process and you can manually focus that if you want there's another technology that exists now and it's internal captured focus stacking it won't stack in the camera but the captures will be made automatically by the camera once you set it up and so nikon calls this focus shift shooting so there are certain cameras that will do focus shift shooting the z7 z6 z72 z62 d850 and there might be some other ones that do it but i know for sure that those those cameras all will do it um so besides that you obviously need a razor sharp af lens the reason you need an autofocus lens as opposed to a manual lens is the camera will autofocus the lens each step of the way meaning it as as the step process goes it'll take make a capture and then refocus the lens make another capture refocus the lens so as long as you have an af camera with a focus shift capable body you're good to go now you can add some light um i add light to almost everything it's just it's just the way that i like to shoot but it's an optional thing to add some speed lights to it and then a key thing is is a stable tripod for me i just feel like if i if i put the camera on a tripod i'm just going to have more success so the workflow is pretty straightforward the first thing as we talked about already you want to set up the camera for your optimum aperture i tend to test all of my lenses so i know which f-stop is the sharpest for each lens and it's it's not always the same sometimes you'll think oh it's it's got to be f8 f8 is in the middle that's a good one in all likelihood f 8 will be a good choice but i have found sometimes 5 6 is the perfect one sometimes f 11 is the perfect one so test your lenses and see what's best for you then you want to decide how do you want to handle the the images themselves you want to shoot jpegs tiff raw i shoot everything raw and then what i do is i convert them out of the raw processor into a tiff after i've toned and color corrected and sharpened and then at that point i build the stack so in focus shift shooting you've got a few choices to make the first one is how many shots do you want to make it's there's no real way to know how many you need but you'll after doing this a few times you'll get a real sense of it the great thing is is the camera seems to know when you've got enough and so if you set it up for too many once it gets to the last point of focus the camera will stop it won't just keep going so i always set it up a little further than i think it's going to need and then it stops if it needs to the step width is how much difference in autofocus do you want between each shot and so i always personally i always set it to the minimum i would i would which is one i would rather give the focus stacking software more information to work with than less and have it try to interpolate in between the frames so i always i almost always use a focus step width of one and then the interval time can be different depending on the situation i tend to be a patient person so i've got it set to five seconds and what that is is it's the time between a capture is made and the next capture is made and so you might say well why five seconds well couple reasons one is at high magnification you want the camera to settle so ah as the as the exposure is made there might be a little vibration internally in the camera and and so i want the camera to stop moving before it makes the next exposure the more common reason is i'm often working with strobes which need to recycle so i want to give them enough time to recycle before i take the next picture otherwise the strobes won't be up to full full power before before that next exposure is made and then i always select this which is silent photography and it just it minimizes the simply it minimizes the movement that the camera is going to make camera controlled and manual focus stacking begins by capturing a series of images all focused on a different part of the subject and then merging them together to create a single image that is precisely sharp anywhere you want precise focus that pretty much distills what focus stacking is and if you look on the right you can see that image of a guitar that's the sequence there's 66 captures starting from the bridge of the guitar all the way to the tuning machines on the head so all the way down the neck it's capturing 66 images starting at the beginning all the way to the end and it's doing all of that internally it's amazing to me that this is possible the other the other way of doing this and the old way of doing it i might be jumping ahead a little bit here is is you can use i always refer to it as a sled but essentially it would mount if when i do it it mounts right here and then the camera mounts to the sled and then the sled itself actually is moving and so when that occurs you're physically moving the camera but it's controlled by a computer and there's a lot more involved in it the idea that this can now be done inside of the camera and you don't need any additional stuff other than the software to stack it with to me is absolutely amazing so once you go to assemble the software you know you need specialized software and what happens is it builds masks on each one of the images all along the way and it only takes the part of the image that's sharp and so it looks something like this as it goes along it's just picking out the sharpest parts of the image and then building the stack and so it analyzes every single frame obviously i've sped it up here but it it that's essentially how it gets built it's kind of amazing technology and for me a lot of people say well isn't this cheating to me it isn't cheating at all essentially what it is is i'm using a two-dimensional medium to show something that we with our eyes can actually see this is how our eyes would see it so you have a couple choices when it comes to software um adobe obviously makes uh photoshop and you can build a stack in photoshop it's a challenge there are much easier ways but it is possible to to to stack within photoshop it's probably easier if you're going to do something with just a handful of images but if you're going to move on to to more than more than four or five i think probably specialized software is is a better choice one of them is made by zarin system it's called zarine stacker it's a really awesome piece of software i use it extensively the other one is called helicon focus it's it's made by helicon soft another awesome piece of software i use this one all the time as well the reason i use two different ones each one to me functions a little bit differently and does a little better job depending on the subject so i tend to use them both so another technique i'd like to talk to you about is water droplets on glass and when i do it i use this platform here and i i what i do is i build glass here and another piece of glass here and a background here and then the camera mounts here and it's looking down straight through the glass this is an upgrade from what i used to do i i when i first started doing this i wasn't sure that it was going to be something i was going to continue to do so i actually built my own platform and i'll show you that in the middle in a minute in case you uh you decide you want to undertake this kind of stuff but the possibilities are really fun this is um for those of you that drink coffee this is the bottom of a french press it's the strainer that holds the grounds back from going into the part that you're gonna drink and the way that this works is it's a water draw it's a series of water droplets on a sheet of glass as i said and the water droplets function sort of like a lens it magnifies whatever is underneath it and so you can see if you look very carefully kind of on the right third of the frame you can see the the out of focus part of the strainer and that's actually the background you're looking through the glass looking at the strainer so that's how it would look if the water droplets weren't there but since i'm focused on the water droplets that part in the background is out of focus but the water droplets like i say function as lenses and they're they're sort of what's focusing on that um on that strainer now the third part of this for this image is the magenta part which is behind the strainer so it's essentially think of it like layers this is the magenta part here this would be the background and then there's another piece of glass here that's holding the strainer itself and then there's another piece of glass that's actually where the water droplets are sitting and that's essentially the setup for for every one of these pictures this is a little different these are cupcake holders and what i did is i soaked them in water and with the idea that i would flatten them out i soaked them in water put them under a book or something like that so that they would be flat and then once they were dried i used them as a subject underneath the water droplets and so again what you see there in the background all those colors are the the cupcake holders themselves this is um out of focus water droplets and you can get this effect with i've tried this with different subjects this happens to be bubble wrap but when you throw the water droplets out of focus you see all kinds of interesting things inside of those water droplets what i've done is i've taken an led panel and i've covered with different colored gels and i've put it on something that will slide back and forth diagonally and so by using the water droplets as the subject if you will uh or the part that i'm focused on the the it magnifies the movement of those of the led panel that's underneath and the colors themselves are what end up creating the stripes inside the water droplets this is just a drain cover that you would put over your like if you were going to do the dishes and you want to make sure like if a ring fell off it didn't go down the drain five dollars at my local home store and essentially um all i did is as i again set that on a piece of glass water droplets are here sitting on a piece of glass and then down underneath is that turquoise background and then i lit the edge of it with that sort of rose-colored light and if you're really careful you can you know you can create you'll notice there's there's like a out-of-focus um holes in the drain cover itself that are part of the background part of what makes this kind of photography really interesting is all the different layers that it seems to create this is similar to the image with the lines what i've done again is i've taken an led panel covered it with different color gels and then rotated it by rotating and then stopping and rotating and stopping you create a dot where it looks like there's there's movement in a certain direction and in this case the movement you're seeing is in the background there but it's tack sharp within the water droplets itself this is a drawer liner it's what you might put in your kitchen drawer to keep silverware from sliding around and by lighting it with different colors you end up you know kind of creating this interesting shape this is a juicer what you might squeeze an orange with same kind of thing multiple levels of color coming through the juicer and then being sharply rendered by the water droplets and this is just it's a miniature colander with holes in it and with a background behind it and again a different version of the spinning spinning led panel magnified by the water droplets this is a sink mat the kind of thing you put in your sink so that if you if a dish slipped out of your hand you know you wouldn't end up breaking the dish hopefully it's just made out of silicone or plastic or something like that and it creates those interesting patterns in the background but when you're focused on it it ends up looking like this i don't know it's just like an interesting looking orb so i want to talk a little bit about the gear required and some of the techniques to to do the water droplet photography again a dslr a mirrorless camera is a necessity a good sharp lens this is the new um s line macro lens that nikon has just come out with i had the opportunity to use it for about a month and i just got to tell you it's a absolutely amazing lens i can't wait to get my own uh gonna be a while i think but uh i'm really looking forward to it so here's the shooting platform i built this out of um abs it's something you can get at your local home center um i was cheap to begin with because i was like well i'll try this technique and if it's fun we'll see so i just got a couple pieces of regular window glass and uh like i say i just cut a couple notches in the abs plastic and uh so it could hold the multiple levels of glass and and went to town and for a while it worked out really well but i upgraded to this which which helps immensely so the other thing you need is you need clear glass and when i first started i ended up using just like i said window glass but i switched to something called starfire glass which is it's much more optically clear and it does it it's it low iron uh or no iron i'm not sure which but what creates the green you see in window glass is the iron in the glass and so starfire glass which is a brand name has um no very low iron in it and so it's very clear and so you need that and some distilled water and then obviously a nice stable tripod is a is an absolute must something called rain-x most people use this on the windshield of their car so that water kind of doesn't build up on your windshield i think is the reason for this but what it does they call it a hydrophobic product and what it does is it causes the water to really bead and so if you don't use this the water just sort of lays flat but when you use this it creates almost like a perfect semi-circle almost like a lens and so um the the technique behind this is essentially you just follow the directions on the on the label it's essentially spray it on wipe it on the glass spray it on something else not on the glass spray it on some on like a very a lint-free cloth wipe it on let it sit for four or five minutes and then buff it really clean and you should be good to go i don't use a misting bottle all that much i use it occasionally i tend to you'll see in a minute i use hypodermic needles but sometimes a little bit of mist just like a kiss of it just a little bit can add a little something to the image this is my preferred way of of placing the water droplets they're just hypodermic needles i draw a little distilled water into it and then inject each droplet where i want it to be one thing you want to make sure of is that everything's level so you want to make sure the background is level with the subject the subject is level with the water droplets and most importantly the back of the camera is level with the water droplets the other two aren't as critical but if they're not what ends up happening if if the camera and the water droplets aren't parallel to one another meaning the sensor and the water droplets themselves if they're not parallel what ends up happening is is you've got parts of the water droplets in focus and parts of them are not and that's generally doesn't look that good an interesting subject is what's interesting about water droplet photography and i learned this the hard way is that things you think are going to be great sometimes aren't and things that seem like they're not going to be all that interesting turn out to be amazing and so you saw this earlier this is the sink mat this turned out to be great and i didn't expect it to be good and then i've gotten other things where i'll try and make a picture with it and i'll work for hours and i just give up and realize you know this is just not meant for water droplet photography so play around some advanced gear speed lights with flexible positioning to me it's really important to be able to put the light exactly where you want it i use a ball head that's the best way for me you know any method that works for you i'm kind of a stickler for i want the light right there as opposed to yeah that's good enough so a ball head is perfect for that one of the things i use when i'm using speed lights is i trigger from the camera which means i don't have to go out to each individual speed light and adjust it i can just adjust it right at the camera and change you know how much power i want coming out of each different speed light really kind of handy and wireless i use light modifiers a lot this is these are grids and what it does is it just kind of keeps light from going everywhere so if i just want light to hit the background only and i want to make sure it doesn't spill up into the subject or worse into the water droplets themselves the grids really help with that and then i use colors a lot sometimes i use this kind of gel sometimes i use what kind of come in sheets they both work equally well i have a lot of backgrounds i i collect them frankly and they each one does something a little bit different they're fun to use you can go to almost any art supply store and you can find you know handmade paper printed color paper pattern shapes prismatic ones there's all kinds of different backgrounds and they all do different things biggest preparation for doing water droplet photography is you have to experiment with different subjects this is these are just colorful straws that i kind of rubber banded together and and stuck into the frame and they worked okay it's not they're not bad uh but sometimes you think they're going to look different than they than they actually do one of the things you'll notice here is i have part of the background exposed meaning the the um the straws are not taking up the entire frame they're only taking off up the right two thirds and so because of that there's another part of the frame and that's the background and so that affords me the opportunity to light in depth but it also you'll notice in the water droplet itself the particular ones off on the left most of them are black and that's because there's not enough subject to cover the entire water droplet so you can use that to your advantage and sometimes it can be a flaw so something to be a keep an eye on you're looking for things that have patterns and shapes and colors and textures you're generally going to get the best result with that but there's all kinds of different ways and different subjects that that you can try out i can't stress this enough if i had a dime for every time that i've not cleaned the glass well enough and you end up spending you know an hour retouching all the little dust particles off the glass it's insanely frustrating so yeah you want to take the time to clean the glass completely all sides of it top bottom top bottom there are a number of factors here that that affect how the finished image looks and so here's a good example of of what a setup looks like this is these are the flattened cupcake holders and so you want to think about the spacing between the camera and the glass the glass and the subject so in this case glass the subject is the water droplets to the cupcake holders and then what's the distance between the subject which is the cupcake holders and the background so in this case i chose to have the cupcake holders be the entire background but if i put them off to one side i'd be seeing all the way through to the bottom so that relationship matters and then the background relates to everything and i'll show you what all this looks like in a second the other thing that you want to do you want to align the camera sensor and the glass surface um that will give i mean it's terrible to to to go to so much trouble to get all the water droplets just the way you want them and then figure out that you know parts of the shot aren't that sharp i inject the water droplets and i can i actually move them around i'll take the tip of the needle and because of the the rain-x the the water droplets will actually slide on the glass so i can take the tip of the needle and push them into position just the way i want them so here's the way that all those interrelationships work the aperture determines the depth of field within the droplets and to the subject itself meaning that how much how much is sharp within the droplet that's going to be determined by the f-stop you choose but it's also going to determine how sharp the actual subject is so it looks kind of like this as you go through those you can see the water droplets become sharper but so does the background so here we're further away and so obviously the droplets have become smaller and so the spacing from the lens to the glass really is what determines how big the droplets are in the frame and you know what kind of depth of field you have because obviously the further away you go the more the the subject itself is going to be sharp as you move in closer you can see that the droplets become bigger and the background becomes much more out of focus get really close and now you'll notice that really only one droplet is is sharp you know most of them are some degree of soft to my eye but the background is as well the spacing between where the water droplets sit and where the subject actually sits meaning this spacing so you've got the camera and you've got the water droplets but you can adjust this level here and so the closer you bring it obviously the more in focus the background is going to be the further away you you move it the more out of focus it's going to be but at some point you're going to start seeing outside of your subject so you'll notice as i move it further away see the black outline around the subject meaning in the water droplets there's now this black outline that wasn't there before because i've moved the subject further away from it and here in this case i've now got it off to the side and i've got no light illuminating the background so in this case we've got three layers again we've got the water droplets here we've got the subject matter here which is one of the cupcake holders essentially taking up couple two-thirds of the frame and then you've got the background which is down here so i'm trying to create sort of a feeling of space but i also want to create a feeling of depth and so one way to do that is by adding a light on that background and it ends up giving you this sense of um if you think of this as space it's like well deep space if you want a little more color you just turn the power up and bring out a little more color you'll notice though in the side of the water droplets that are sitting out there in the in space you can see it's magnifying that that point that blue background so all of this relates to each other and that's it's all it's the challenge but it's also the fun in that you know you have to play with it to find the exact relationship that works for the picture you're trying to make so a couple of tips here um i tend to work tethered to a computer um i i like seeing the image really really big and it tells me a lot of things one is it sharp is it really sharp and also it tells me you know do i have any defects sometimes like a water droplet will have a water droplet within it and it looks funny it almost looks like two eyes or something like that those kinds of details i want to see large before i you know tear down the set and figure out i'm done and only to find out there's a defect i use a remote release so that the i don't actually physically touch the camera and that way you know it minimizes vibration i use a flash a lot to freeze movement as well and again like we just talked about the experimentation part is really key you've got to play with aperture and its impact on the depth of field those interrelationships between you know the water droplets the subject in the background there's no one right way to do it i've had it so that the water droplets were here in the background was right underneath it i'm sorry the subject was right underneath it and the background was way down here and i've also had it so that the subject was way far away so you know depending on what you're trying to say with your pictures you know try it in a lot of different ways this is i just talk about the picture a little bit this is again a defocused uh defocus water droplets and uh you know you there's a there's a i have a background that's creating a pattern and it gives you that out of focus circle thing but it also gives you these interesting shapes within the water droplets itself i really like to inject the droplets using different size needles the different gauge needles allow me to pass different amounts of water through the tip of the needle you will all discover this i'm sure when you start using one of these hyper hypodermic needles they do they're not smooth and so you will invariably get a perfect arrangement of water droplets and you'll be trying to just get a little bit more out of the needle and it will suddenly release and it'll just spray the entire setup with all this water and you have to start all over it's just it's part of the process got to be patient so when it comes to the you know the subject you want to experiment with light and and really think about how it is that you can make whatever it is the subject is have some shape so in this case this is a sink that sync mat that we talked about this what i did is i lit the background one color then i lit the sink mat a different color but but the same color i used the same color on the other side so you'll notice that on the mat itself there's this orange gel color and in the back behind the sink mat is that same color you'll also notice that there's the purple and all those colors are mixing together and it gives you this dimensionality that wouldn't be there the key part though is no part of the light is actually hitting the water droplets you have to be very careful to shield the droplets themselves so that the light hits the subject and the background but it doesn't hit the droplets themselves everybody has a different feeling about what kind of colors work well together and how much you want to use them one thing i've never done it it occurs to me just as i'm i'm sharing this with you is i've never done a black and white of of water droplets i love black and white and i've i've never done it and it's i think because the the water droplets have always lent themselves to color so it's just not something i've ever tried but you know if you think about tones if you want to try black and white think about it in terms of tones if you want to stick with color think about how the colors play off one another how they complement one another or how they might fight one another transparent and translucent subjects are really really interesting um i started off working with things that were solid like those colanders and things like that where there were just holes but it turns out that translucent stuff like this sink mat tend to work really really well and then when it comes to the background i find that what works out best is if you have the background cover the entire frame and if you think about what a water droplet is it's almost like a fisheye lens so it's seeing the whole area so even though normally when i'm shooting here i've got an area that's like the size i don't know maybe of a half dollar maybe smaller a nickel but this whole area is being seen because it's it's treating it very much like a like a fisheye would so you're seeing all the way to the edge of the the the edge of the frame you know i tend to try to use tones and colors to create depth the whole thing that makes this fun is that you're creating something that feels three-dimensional it doesn't feel too dimensional and you can help it along with you know by using light in such a way that just adds dimension to what you're doing and then you know experimenting with background combinations obviously here this is again um you know one of those subjects that's got a bunch of holes in it and what i've chosen to do is light some of the holes one color and some of the holes a different color and you end up with this kind of an effect it's a real key part of this is how does the f stop and how does the relationships affect what's going on in the background so in this case we've got the sharp water droplets but when you look in the background there you've got that glowy center and the and the soft part that that's around it how soft do you want that to be you determine that by the relationship of how how close is that subject to the water droplets and also what f-stop have you chosen the way i look at water droplets and the way i look at macro kind of in general one of the reasons i built this studio in the first place was because it's it's a place to get lost meaning all of us have stressful lives and you know we were looking for a way to stay creative but at the same time not feel like you have to work too hard to stay creative and so macro at least for me is is that thing it's that escape into some world for two or three or four or sometimes all day trying to make a picture that you're creating from beginning to end and so you know i've said this before some people do yoga or they go running or whatever the case may be in in my case i love to just get lost in trying to work through the iterative process of creating a picture and and i use that word intentionally creating a picture is you start with absolutely nothing it's like it's an absolute blank canvas and you say i'm gonna build a picture and so in this case what i've done is i bought two silicone trivets they're the kind that you you know would put like a hot pan on or something on that and you would keep the kitchen counter from getting scorched by using these and what i did is i you know butted them up to get against one another and then just sort of raked light across the surface of them so that you would have highlights on the top of the ridges and shadows down in the valleys of them and then the water droplets just you know of different sizes turned them into this you know very space-age trippy kind of a thing but you know it took probably four hours to produce the picture but at the end of the day it's it's it's exhilarating to do it you know and and you get lost in it which is you know if i can encourage you to explore a little bit um it's there's a state you can get into and i sound all woo-woo but it really is true it's it's a amazing feeling to get lost in creating and so all of a sudden you look at your watch and a couple hours have gone by and you go where did the time go well the time went into you trying to perfect your craft and and make something amazing it's also an opportunity to you know experiment design stretch discover evolve create it really is makes macro photography something that you can really dive head first into particularly the kind where you're you're making the picture you know there's there's the kind of macro photography where you go out in the garden you see a really pretty flower and you take a snapshot of it that's macro photography as well this is a little bit different in that essentially you're you're creating it out of nothing [Music] so i'd like to finish with a series of pictures that i've been working on lately and it's it's mixing oil with water it's magical to see an image like this come up in your camera and it's not hard to do it's really i just use you know like a glass dish filled with distilled water and then put the bubble or put the oil onto the surface of the water and then again very much like the water droplets you can move them around the key ingredient here is you want to use a little dish detergent which sort of breaks the oils surface a little bit and you end up with these with these bubbles this is a little different kind of light and a little different kind of background i've chosen to essentially you know put this gigantic bubble and little tiny ones around it in a big sea of water i like the solitary feel of it but in this case i was looking more for you know as many bubbles as i could get this is a series of oil bubbles climbing up the edge of a glass so essentially what we're looking at we're looking down into a glass that's holding the the water and the surface is covered in these bubbles and they're up in the top there you can see they're they're reflected in the side walls of the glass change the lighting stay with you know um big bubble medium bubbles small bubbles change the lighting and get a whole different picture i have so much fun looking at this because it looks like they're just going to roll off the edge it just feels like they're going to roll off and and there's not going to be any bubbles this is um one big bubble and one small bubble it feels planetary to me for some reason it feels like a gigantic planet a tiny little baby moon just a collection of bubbles that i moved around and arranged into a grouping that that looked look pleasing so let me show you how i do this it's a short little video kind of explains in here how it all works it turns out that when it comes to pictures oil and water do mix hi i'm joey terrell professional photographer and nikon ambassador i've been wanting to experiment with combining oil and water introducing a colorful background adding some artificial lighting and then capturing the results with a razor sharp macro lens combining oil and water creates some truly interesting shapes and patterns and the possibilities invite experimentation with different magnifications unusual lighting and a variety of tones and hues bubbles and light are an endless playground for photographers you can create hundreds of bubbles or just a few and then illuminate them in countless ways the bubbles are created by placing some water into a dish introducing some olive oil or mineral oil and then adding a drop or two of dish detergent to help to disperse the oil and create the bubbles you can use almost any oil and with each variety you'll achieve a slightly different result you can even gently coax the bubbles into the composition that looks best to you for every one of these images i used a single small soft box with a fabric grid to light only parts of the background because of the uneven light each area of bubbles appears to have a slightly different intensity depending on the background and the position of the light now every photographer i've ever known is perpetually searching for two things new subjects or new ways to photograph the familiar ones that answer is often found through a change of perspective such as through a new lens or a newly learned technique other times though it's found through limitation well the last year has definitely limited the movement of most photographers i know and that's made it a great time to rediscover what's familiar or handy or worthy of being photographed the last year has really reaffirmed that making pictures is a joy even when it's being done safely indoors whether it's kitchen gadgets bird feathers or mineral oil bubbles the subjects are there to discover interpret and share through photographs and with that i just want to say thank you for spending time with me today i want to thank b h for inviting me to do this i want to thank nikon as well for supporting photographers both b h and and nikon support photographers in ways that we could not do our jobs without them and i really appreciate it and thank you for spending the time with us today it was really fun

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 34,913

Keywords: b&h photography seminars, macro lens, macro photography water drop refraction, macro water drop photography tutorial, water drops on glass, macro photography focus, macro tips, macro photography focus stacking, image stacking, macro for beginners, macro refraction photography, macro photography ideas at home, macro photography ideas to shoot at home, macro at home, macro photography tips, macro photography ideas, guide to macro photography, macro photography aperture settings

Id: YKn2ahedLVs

Length: 55min 19sec (3319 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021