How To Do Macro and Closeup Photography

1. Introduction To Macro Photography: Hi, my name is Jay scalpel and I'm already photographer, or at least I used to be. I had my own studio in Springfield, Missouri. But four years ago, like kind of semi retired and moved to Thailand. My eyes aren't as good as it used to be. I'm getting eaten up there and my age, but I still enjoy photography. So I'm making this course to help others who would like to learn more about my global target Fe. Now, you're here to learn macro photography and I'm here to help you achieve them goes, what are we going to learn? What are we going to talk about? How can I help you become a better photographer? Well, this course is not for the beginner. Discourse is for the intermediate photographer. If somebody who already has a general understanding of how camera gears work. This course is for somebody who is looking to expand their current skill set. A hobbyist, Brody does photography and would like to add my proper title of the board close-up photography into the mix. Discourse has asked for somebody who is in marketing or sales, who needs to a better understanding or better way to capture their product today can display it in the best light. So what kind of gear or you're going to need? Where you're going to need a dedicated micro lens. If you did not have a dedicated micro Leon's, I will show you other ways around there. Other alternatives are recommended is for gas or, or, or a mirrorless camera. Smart phones can do micro, but the desired effect is far from adequate. There was just not up to par. A digital pastoral are repaid dedicated my colon. Now these techniques that I'm gonna be TCU can be used indoors or outdoors for today's purpose in, for this course in general, all my studies or mainly be done indoors. I like to control the elements in the surroundings. So we're going to be working out of an indoor studio. So we're also going to talk about software. We're going to talk about photo stacking. We're going to talk a little bit about photo editing. I will show you some of the programs that I used as well as three programs. Because let's be honest, not everybody can afford Adobe Photoshop. Not everybody can afford like well, for helium can focus versus what I use. So there are alternatives that are free, and I will show you what they are to help you with your photography. So if you are still in university and learning macro photography, and you think I might be able to help you with I'm pretty companies, I can. Then let's learn some micro photography. 2. What is Marco Photography: Hi again. So what is my chromatography or close up photography? Macro photography is taken something very tiny, tiny objects, tiny bugs, flowers, things that normally go unseen. And make an life-size, make an enlarge. The close-up photography is similar to Michel photography in that week. Take something small and enlarge it. But the techniques are a little bit different. True macro photography gives you a one-to-one magnification so that our z that you are photographing is life-size on the sensor. Whereas just close up photography would be more like 12. So the object is larger that the magnification is not there. So there's taken a chance to stop and look at some pictures of Tao. My chromatography gets some samples and some ideas on where you're going to be learning in this course. Somebody's techniques we will be doing. You will enjoy some of the projects that we will do together. So it doesn't look at some pictures. This first picture is a picture of a ring. Is that the one of my rings that I wear all the time. I like the splash red common alpha, the gemstone over here in the corner. Very nice. This next picture is a picture of a flower. And a lot of people into flowers. They love taking pictures of flowers. Now this flower is actually very small, very small flower. But because of microbic geography, is larger than life. When we put it out. Here, we have a soap bubble. That is, soap bubble is flows. And by threes in it, you get ice crystal form all over the bubble. This is a foreign technique to master and our steel mass doing it. But it's fun. You have contained. So mobile photography in extreme cold weather. So ideal for the summer time, appropriate for them TO bring two days, then you're stuck at home. So the level photos and so follow-up studies. Here we have an i, kinda cool again, orange part. A lot of times microbiota, there is just simply Part C, what we become a real taken, but normally isn't seeing and making it seen and in such a way that it creates, for example, watch. Notice how a lot of it is out of focus. One of the things that you will learn about Michel photography, it is very hard to get everything in politics are limitations when you are magnifying NAC close. Your depth of field is blazer D and there's techniques to use to get everything in focus, layer color, focus, stacking, rings. I'm going to teach you now to do. Here we have a water planet. I loved on water drop photography is one of my favorite. In the image that you see in the water drop. The dads lead the background. And the technique that we use to take this picture, jets the Emory's from the background into the water droplet. We are want to do this in class. So you're going to get a chance to create your own water droplet picture will be exciting, to be exciting. And I'm gonna walk you through it step-by-step and show you exactly how to do it. And see what do we have maps. Woo, some flower. Petals. A little bit of wearing Glass are beautiful, beautiful. A lot of times in my photography I use a lot of black might well. And if I don't have a black background, does a technique you can use to get a black bag well, using your brush. And I will show you that as well. I'll show you how we can achieve built even in bright sunlight. It can be so bright that you have diverse sunglasses. You can still achieve a solid black background. I'm going to show you that technique. Some of you may already know it for those who don't. Importance rates. Here's another water droplet. In this time we have a big watered bar plus a bus, a little tiny ones. Very nice. Slider. Buddha that level, good bug me. Analyte bones. But they made it pictures and a lot of bones or photogenic. They like to have their picture taken. My chromatography. How many people have ever seen a spider disclose? Maybe in a magazine or on a boat. Butterflies and butterflies common so many colors. They are very beautiful. And one of my favorite things to photograph our butterflies when I'm out in a park walking around with my camera. So those are just a few examples of my chromatography or close up photography. And together we're going to learn how to do this. We're going to learn the techniques and the strategies that I use to take every single one of these pictures. Now in the next section, I want to talk to you for a few minutes about my teaching style. And Cl2 way I teach is the way you like to learn. So in the next section, we're going to learn how I teach. If you've realized skip that section by all means please there. So then you may go straight into the first unit on my chromatography. See you there. 3. How I Teach My Course: Hi, and welcome back. Now before we get into the main course, I want to take a couple minutes just to explain you my teaching style. Thank you. See if there's something you'd be interested in. Yes, I don't want you to invest in a course that you feel you're not going to be able to learn and benefit from. My teaching style is as follows, one by nu, talking heads all the time. That's so boring. They put me to sleep. I can imagine a student have an acidic do a three hour course of a talking head. I don't like to use PowerPoint unless I have to. So those would be very limited if at all. My style of teaching that actually hands on teaching that I've got my camera in my hand. I would like for you to have your camera in your hand. And I would like for you to follow along in, mimic and follow in. Do I do? If I'm doing something, I want you to do it. That's how you learn. You learn by actually doing it. Now by Watson, somebody taught. Never do an art project. And we'll set up our scenes and are getting into photo stack in or whatever the particular less will be. I want you again to be able to follow along. If you actually do it with me side-by-side as a barber standing or sitting by their review. And we're doing it together. Pause the video, rewind it, replay it. That's what it's there for. So that's my thesis style. Now, my units of globe down into a format. By every unit, I start out with a little brief introduction and all that is is just a quick overview. That will be a talking head, like what we're doing here. Just a quick overview on what you can expect to learn from that unit. The second lesson in that unit will be basic fundamentals. Just a little bit of information that I feel would be beneficial to you so you can get the most out of that unit. We won't go into great detail is not going to be all technical. Just some basic fundamentals for all your benefit from. After that we get into actually the hand phone, reactant historic, doing the exercises restored during the lessons. And I start showing you, walk in, you do step-by-step, hour take your hand and I will walk. You step-by-step. Didn't cause that could be 123. If you ever take lessons in this unit, rebel call to action. Faster. I turn it over to you. And I want you to apply what you have learned for that unit. And that's how I break down each one of my units are quick overview. Basic fundamentals that I fear you need. Follow the hands on lesson material where we actually do the stuff to the other Nana called action where you can put everything into motion that you have learned in that unit. And I will provide resources along the way that will help you in this journey. So that's it. That's our There is for you to know about my teaching style. So if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's jump into the first unit. And this learns Michel photography. 4. Introduction Macro Photography Gear: Hi again. So in this section, section two, we're going to start talking about micro photography camera here. Now here I have my Nikon be 715 is are they both frame camera with a dedicated my microglia? And this is a true one to one layer. But I want to talk to you about other gear in ways to still do Michael the part of the, even if you don't have a dedicated means. Because unlike a lot of people will tell you a dedicated macro lens, it not required to do my chromatography. There are other workarounds that I will talk to you about in this section as well. Whereas just doing close-up photography with any liens and you might have telephoto would be better. But I'm gonna talk to you about that as well. We're going to discuss cameras. You and I discussed lenses. Other gear that you can use. Laws are going to discuss some photography software free and paid. And then I'm going to give you a call to action. This is a checklist of your gear. And I want you to go through that checklist and identify what you have for two gear for a workaround for something that you don't there and can't give, as well as just specifications in the limitations on the gear that you do that. So that is the introduction for this unit of quick overview on what we're going to be learning in discussing. 5. Basic Fundamentals for Macro Photography Gear: Hi, welcome back. So before we get into this unit talking about macro photography gear, this top, a couple minutes about fundamentals of photography to basics. Now there were some things that we have to take into account when we up-close Michel photography or working distance. The working distance is part of the fight of demands to our subject. That is our working distance. Now that's not the only factor we have to take into consideration. We also have our minimum focus limb and our minimum focus lumped it not from the file, but the Lean's to our subject is actually from the sensor camera. If you look on your camera, there's a little white circle with a line through it that indicates where the sensor is in your camera. You'll find it on all of your cameras. This is my other camera. See it right there. That is where the sensor is. It's all been really are trying to figure out what our minimum focus may appears. We measure from the sensor, not from a firm of camera that Lean's not on the front of the lens. So how do we find that? We're, there's a couple ways you can do it. The easiest way for me is just to look in my manual, Europe Terrier. But sometimes manuals can be confusing. You can also Google it. If you just Google this, say for instance, I want to find out my 85 millimeter plane. My 85 millimeter apply, but I want to know what by minimum focusing their fears. So I can find all the specs in information about distant organs by Google in it. So let's go to Nightline site. The basswood came up when I Googled disciplines. So here your R nytimes site, and you can see that the lesions on the screen is the same one. I'm holding this the 85 millimeter. So I'm going to cut out of the picture four seconds so you can actually see without me being in the way. So let's scroll down to specification section. And you should be able to find a specification or any lesions that you are using. Here we see that focal length pedestrians is 85 millimeter. Maximum aperture, maximum aperture is 1.8. Now what the maximum aperture is is meaning that Lean's is Foley open. So Foley open. Seat a little UPN. If I fully opening that steps 1.8, that is fully open. The minimum aperture of a beat there, 16 for Justinian's. And that is fully stopped down. Very tiny hole. So the minimum depth 16. Now remember, the smaller the opening, the less light that is coming into the camera. And without light cannot get a picture that we started getting no worries in our picture started to deteriorate. So lighting is very important. The next thing I want to draw your attention to is the minimum focus distance. The minimum focus distance for this Lean's, that is 0.8 meters or 2.6 to 8.8 meters or 2.62 feet. Now remember, we're talking about flown the sensor from the sensor and the front of the lens. So 2.6 to 13. But what I'm saying, Buckley Bell, 200 thousand. See my tape measure here about so anyone get it into that camera every goddess for me back here. So this is going to be the sensor. And then my subject can be read by other hand needs. That's the distance that I have to be away from my subject in order to get the bokeh is when using the Nikon 35 millimeter. So those are, you have you could consider when you're setting up for your micro photography is how close can you get? It's still good focus plus your actual working distance for reasons we'll be fine. Flow of your DNS to your subject. Now, don't longer focal length. The further back you can get and still keep the subject pretty large in refrain. Best and look at another picture, and I will give you another example. So here you see four pictures. One sharded, 18 millimeter, one shot at 50 millimeter, one shot at a 100 millimeter, and one shot at 200 millimeter. We are focusing on the same subject. It's the little window white above the main door. Now, at 18 millimeter versus 200 millimeter, there's a big difference. These pictures were both taken fun or excuse me, these four pictures were both taken from the same exact spot, stood in one spot and took off or pictures. So what is the difference between shooting with a 50 millimeter, 200 millimeters to 10 bit of fluidity. To under it. I wanted to get the air maids as big as 5200 millimeter. Let's go back to that first picture again. By why did you get this 50 millimeter to look like this 200? What would happen? I would have to get a clue The close to my subject, I would have to get pretty close. I couldn't be Bay back here. I would have to get really appear where you are on top for my subject. So the longer your focal length, the further back you can be, and that happens to be so close. Now, microbe photography lenses, dedicated macro photography lenses. Actually the objects and the way they are designed enable you to get closer to your subject in gear, good magnification. And just like in focal length, they come in different sizes. Mine is a 90 90 millimeter. You can get a more work to a 100 on my floor. The longer the further back you can be. Unlike my 90, it does an ideal job for my photography. So focal distance, how close you can good a sensor to your subject. Working distance from the throne and deletions to your stomach. Now, stave ability comes into play. Stable ability is how steady you can hold this camera. How steady, denoted when we are talking about depth of field and wider that opening on our camera, the less that is in focus, we started getting about razor sharp focus play. Rather than dealing with macro photography. It's not as bad when we are dealing with scenery. Stuff that's not close up on macro photography. Here we have that butterfly picture. You can see how the butterflies in sharp focus, but every day behind the butterfly is blurred out. We are using to Beth to 0.8 aperture. So the ilium is ride opening, degradation go, but applies in focus. Everything else There's blurred out. So at 2.8 and the picture on the right, you can see that the flower is in focus and everything else is blurred out. Not so bad when you're talking about scenery. Non closer. Non. My chromatography. At f.16, everything is in focus every day from the flower all the way to the distance provides them, which is great. This is great for normal photography. But when we start talking about Michael the Tartuffe, the closer you get to your subject, the closer you get, the less that stays in focus, that focus plane become smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes just a razor thin focus plane. So then we start writing to other problems like blurry parts of our picture. Even though islands may be very small and very tiny. Let's look at another example of that. Here you see a ring, see how every day it's out of focus. This was shot with a closed down amplitude, close down amateur f 16, which normally on a normal photograph that made everything in focus The closest to the others. But in macro photography, it doesn't work that way because we're so close to our subjects that doubt area of focus, even at F6, is very narrow, very thin. Same thing on this picture. Bury the end area of focus. Items can be millimeters apart, meal meetups, and yet still be out of focus. So how do we combat this? How to, how do we overcome these focusing problems? But that's were both just stacking comes into play. And we will be doing an entire lesson. Toyota unit actually on focus backing. So we've talked about you're working distance, your actual focus distance. The problems and limitations that we run into when trying to give close up and make war, but Tartuffe, as far as what can be in focus and what cannot. Light is a big problem. The smaller your aperture, your opening, the less light. So we have to overcome that by slowing down our shutter speed. But when you slow down your shutter speed, now you start introducing camera shake and motion blur. And remember, Look talking about a razor sharp area or the focus, focused plane. So to Hades movement and your client at home, that camera is small letter on a razor focused, but we'll put a image out of focus. So stabilize it. So when we need iPads or some way to stabilize to take out that motion. And possibly a remote way to fire the cameras so that we can have hands off, locked the mirror. If your camera has that function, are these little techniques we will go into further detail throughout the course. So that's basically fundamentals of Michael photography in some of the problems that we will run into. And hopefully by the end of this course, I'll be able to show you some work around and show you how to overcome these limitations to their new tube containing wonderful, great by global target the pictures. 6. The Camera Used in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So in this lesson we're going to talk about cameras. There are different types of cameras from just for SLRs to mirrorless pointed shoes, to the cameras we find in our laptops, in our tablets or phones. Now different cameras have different sensor sizes. So that's why I want to start this conversation. The different sensors sizes, depending on the type of camera you might have. So let's look at a picture of some different sensors sizes. Here. If you'll notice, we have three different cameras for photo frame and APS and a four-thirds. Now the full-frame sensor is 36 by 24 millimeters. The APS sensor is 23.6 by 15.6 millimeters. Now, an APS can be an APS-C or an API S phase. The depths of betweenness seen aids is Nikon or Canon. And then a fourth, third, beside a sensor size of 17, 13 millimeters. Those are typically your mirrorless cameras. So as you can see by the picture I just showed you, those are the difference between a full-frame, a clot frame, Porter's five now, my D 750 is a full-frame. This is a full frame camera. My D7 1000 is a crop sensor, is a dx, what we call a ds. That's the APS. Without a ds, i ne and mirrorless where it's I don't have a mirrorless I don't own one. Would be like Dove for dirt's sensor. Now those are not the only three sensors sides. It's Let's look at another picture that goes into some of the other sensor sizes. One of them is going to surprise you. Here you see we have the very first one is a medium format. It is 44 by 33 millimeters. Named a photo frame, 36 by 24 to APS stage. In APS-C. We saw your DS sensors. Your micro four-thirds. We see is your more like your mirrorless cameras. You also have a warning dense sensor. You have a sensor that is 7.60 by 5.70 millimeters thick. At the very last, 1.544 by 3.42 millimeters. I'm going to take a guess for that one is that's your smartphone, whether it's an iPhone or Android. That's how tiny the sensor is in a fall. Now, why am I pointing this out? Part of micro photography or photography in general, has to do with the sensor size. The bigger the sensor devoted a picture. In a lot of camera manufacturers wanted their biggest selling points is how big their sensors are. And a full frame sensor that you can. Tail is 36 by 24, is massive compared to the sensor in a phone, which is 4.54 back 3.42. Now that says on the phone may advertise that is 24 megapixels. Where's my HVO fame? Nikon D 750 is also 24 megabyte moves. But I can feel bigger pixels on my full-frame. The new can't on now, since it on a phone, try and fit 24 million pixels of class, that little tiny sensor. The pictures may look great for snapshots and Instagram. But if you go to blow it up to full size picture that you're hanging on your wall. We'll talk in like 30 answers by 24 or a regular sized picture is not going to happen. It will never happen. The pixels are way too small and you start blown up that big picture just becomes totally trash. For the purpose of our course today, we're not dealing necessarily with bones. We're dealing with just square so ors for mirrorless. But if all you have is a phone, you can still do Michel photography. So let's look at another. Another picture here. Here you can see a whole thing that's the entire picture in its entirety. And me and we have the APS, we have to make loved or maybe have the unions. Now, typically, the warnings and the Michael Thursday, those are your mirrorless cameras. Apr so your dx, square so ors, and then your full frame, that fx is a solid. Nothing's being clamped on that one is so true, one-to-one. Now, what I wanna do is I want to take you into light will. And I want to demonstrate because looking at it in the picture is one thing. But I want to demonstrate to you exactly what's happening inside of the camera. From a full-frame already down to the mirrorless. What is happening? So let's go into light room. Here's the photo flame, the airbags to fo for investors does the entire picture in its entirety. Now, if I crop in, this is what a DS camera does. That's why they call my class sensor and Fight Club in Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo, Doo, Doo. Okay. So we are clubbed here. See how most of the picture is cut off. Now what happens is, you don't know this, you don't see it. You don't know that all of this that's grayed out is being cut off. Amy, you get the picture and you look at it. This is what you see. So what the crop sensor does is it expands it to feel define, to feel the picture in essence is magnifying it. And I ds magnifies by 1.5 or 1.6 magnification. Whereas a full-frame is a one-to-one, no magnification. Now, if you go to the micro four-thirds and micro four-thirds, same day, It's fat certainly magnifying. The picture is magnified by arpanet down, is magnifying the pixel. Now I can get through, but you can clearly get a general idea of what's happening. See how it's magnified it up. Look at this picture very says This one. So here is the FX as every day in That's true picture. Here's a Mayflower for theory. This is a typical mirrorless camera. So that is how your sensors work. Inside your cameras. They act the clock depicts you're in in camera or just like I'm doing it here in late world in an expanding to feel differ. So here we are rolled back into regular view. Now, I want to show you something else. The difference between a digital SLR and a mirrorless. The main thing is that a discourse war has moving parts. Let's look at a illustration of what I'm talking about. If you see here you've seen a mirror. The mirror comes up to show moves, exposures to censor the mirror. Shutter comes back down to mirror, closes again. Mirror comes up, shoulder moves, exposures to censor, shutter comes back down. Mirror closes again. And that's the ruling party. That's why does graphs are or is behaving good. They have all these moving parts in them. Mirrorless camera, on the other hand, does not have any moving parts. Does sensor is electronic. So the sensor itself gets case, turns on and off, on and off, on and off. There's no moving parts, no shutters, no mirrors, movement up and down. So there are a lot lighter plow Vermeer's to sensors our last smaller. Now, is that a good day? Know about that. But that's actually a good thing. That's actually a good thing. Though. Crop sensor or a mirrorless camera were paved four-thirds. It's actually better for my chromatography then my affects my full-frame because we're we're doing micro photography. What are we trying to do was point a micro photography in the first place to magnify something that very tiny, make it be life-size. Well, with the use the micro lenses we can achieve there. You pair that with a dx for crop frame camera. And you'll get an extra magnification that the camera is automatically cropping and magnifying 1.51.62. In the end, the lesions on top of that. Crop frame cameras, FX cameras are full-frame dx crop frame cameras. You get a better magnification using the Crop camera. And for your pocketbook, many lies. Clock cameras. Yet clathrin cameras are cheaper. They're cheaper than a full-frame camera. But they can't live with a full-frame camera when it comes to overall quality. Because again, the bigger the sensor to better depiction. Now, the last picture I want to look at, It's just very simple. It's just talking about phones. Whether you have an apple, I saw an Android. There's cameras and the cameras are coming along raise on phones to those no longer just one camera like it used to be. Now, phones have 234 cameras building tool in all these cameras worked together to give you pretty good pictures. And you can take some pretty awesome pictures until you tried to blow up. The minute you tried to blow it up and make a poster size pixels to Hanoi, you all. That is rayon. Phones fall apart. I don't care if UK 2000 dollars without iPhone is not going to blow that picture to life-size member. The sensor is very tiny. We'll talk in 54 millimeters. Very tiny. Okay? So that pretty much covers cameras bodies. And what the difference is between a discourse or a mirrorless. I didn't really needing to point and shoot or your cell phone. In our next lesson, we will dive deeper into lenses. I will see you then. 7. The Macro Photography Lens: Welcome back. So we've talked about some basic fundamentals of macro photography, and we've talked about the camera body itself. Now let's talk about lenses. Now the purpose of a mindful means is you hear this magnification to make tiny objects appear larger than life. Now, different macro lenses had different magnification ratios. You have a one to two. This isn't truly a Mac Booleans, then you have a one-to-one resist. The most common name even has a one to five. Let's look at an example of those three different magnifications and compare the differences. So here you'll see three pictures. The one on the far left is a one note to the one in the middle is a one-to-one. This is what we call true microbe. And then one on a white, there's a five to one. Canyon has a lens that does 52 wine versus its dream micro photography. We will talk more about micro lenses in a minute. But first, let's say to you don't have a Boolean. So what are your options where you can still use a regular Leon's to do close up in trying to similarly what you would get with a macro lens. So how do we do that? Well, remember when I talked about your minimum focal distance, that is very important because in order to achieve the maximum magnification that you are Lean's Hindu, you have to be at the minimum focal level, anything closer and you cannot achieve focus further. And as you start step and back further and further away, the item start becoming smaller than you started with, the moves into magnification. So the maximum magnification of the needle aliens will be at its minimum focal length. So let's read, look at that. Let's start with a 50 millimeter. Here's Nikon, 50 millimeter to smallest Lean's I have in my camera bag. And if I go down here to the specifications, print information maximum aperture as 1, a minimum aperture of f 16. But what we're interested in is the minimum focal distance with your c is 0.45 meters or 1.48 feet by 18 answers. So I can get to again, 18 years is still be able to achieve focus with this slant. Let's look at the biggest fans I have, which is my seventy two hundred seventy two hundred bucks at the specification along this line. F2, 0.8 for the maximum aperture, f 22 for the minimum amplitude. Now why do I keep talking about amplitude? But when we're doing macro photography, focus comes into play. And the smaller the opening, the higher the number, the more that is in focus. If you're open, all the way open is via these, it'll go at 2.8. Then your, this plane is for me very thin. So to give more in focus, especially with macro photography, we want to use a higher f-stop. But that creates other problems and we'll get into that later on. So the minimum focal Liam for my 70 to 100, 1.1 meter or 3.6 feet. So 3.5, almost four feet away. But I get a magnification of all way up to 200 millimeters versus pretty good. However, what you have, but you'll notice is the shorter the focal length, the closer I can get, but the less magnification or half, the longer the focal length, the further back I have to be, but the greater demand application I have. So those are some limitations with lenses. So dedicated macro lens will eliminate some of those lens lens problems because they're dedicated micro lands, the mechanics, the way they are designed and structured, or to give you maximum magnification at very close 70s to your subject. Very close match. Then we want to talk about web lenses is the sharpness, the quality of sharpness. Most normal camera lens is focused by moving the entire assembly for objects. Does not do it in macro photography. Having a optics move in, it's best to be a moves externally can scare away your subject if you're photographing something like an insect or Berg. Most macro lenses have the internal and there is called a floating objects. Basic justice that lands internally given sharper focus and contrast. And you don't have an external moving parts are. So another thing you want to look for in your lenses is vibration reduction, VR. What are the differences between trying to use a regular lens and trying to use a micro Lean's more. Let's look at another example, another picture that goes into a little bit more detail about that. Here you'll see an example of magnification, a real size mosquito or above. And let's say that you're using a 50 milliliter lands or something even smaller. The madman them occasion is going to be about a one McKeon. See how big it is on the sensor. Now, this look at a one to 61 to four as I'm working away a Class 1, 2, 3, one due to a Nim, one-to-one, One-to-one being a true micro Lean's. Notice how the economies went from being very tiny at the one Tn to build in. Sensor impacts the not being able to fit completely on the sensor at a one-to-one. Now another thing to take into consideration versus when I mentioned in the camera bodies, is all you use in a full-frame camera body, or you use in a dx, a crop frame. Let's look at this next picture. Here. We have a full frame and an APS versus a crop sensor. The coin is exactly the same. Club assessors do not magnify bar subject. Our coin is exactly the same. But because they are a club sensor, it gives the illusion that is magnifying when you plan the picture out. So if you print this picture out, shot with a full frame and you print depicts route sharp with a club. Since Soviet, your object is going to feel the picture of more, the paper, it's going to fill it up more on Cloud. It's not really magnifying it as just cropping it in May my showed you that in light room, when I cropped in, it gives the illusion of magnification. This is good because the image quality will be at a good standard, very high standard that you can actually cheat and macro photography in getting better magnification by using the APS or a crop sensor. Then using a full-frame sensor. And a good way to cheat and get extra magnification. Now the thing you want to remember is the closer you can focus the law reserve the image is going to be if you have to choose between rich lands to use, because say you don't have a micro Lean's go whip the longest focal length you have, even though you won't be able to get as close, you'll still be able to get better magnification. If you're choosing a micro lands, then you can get very close and not have any of the pitfalls of trying to use a regular lens. Now there are other alternatives that we can add on to Art Lenses to turn a regular leads into a macro lens. And we will look at those in the next section. 8. How To Turn a Normal Lens Into a Macro Photography Lens: Hi, welcome back. So now let's talk about alternatives. If you don't have a dedicated micro aliens, how can you still achieve Michel photography? There's various options. Let's go with the cheapest 1 first. The cheapest 1 first is simply to get a focus filter. They close up focus filter. Let's take a look at one here you can see this one is for Canon. Close-up Leon's. Combine them individually or you can buy a mean kids 1 times, 2 times 4 times 10 times. I happen to have a set of closer filters. I don't use them. I had on our bottom to play around with. But I don't really use in that mud. They are stackable. See how I drew them together so I can stack all four together. Two word of caution though, we knew our stacking lenses together, you're introducing more elements into the picture, into the myths. And that starts to deteriorate your pictures. Each time you add a new filter, your picture or degrade just a little bit. But it is feasible by stack of four these together, I can get a plus 17. Now, how do I use this? How do I use this filter? Was very simple. On the front of your lens. This is not 50 millimeter. There are threads and I simply just grew that onto the sign of it. And voila, I can now do some macro photography. This is a magnifying glass, magnifying what I am seeing, magnifying my image, my subject. So that is one option that I'm very cheap, very affordable. Energy, yes, one to experiment and practice with macro photography. You see something new like before you invest in a dedicated lands. This is a Grb passion. Not the best option, but a good, cheap parser. Just buy you a closer filter. The second option would be to mount your Lean's backwards. Yes, that is also possible. Take a look at another item. Here you see a reverse wing. Now, I don't have any reverse beings ticket. I don't use this technique if I have a dedicated macro lens. But whatever reverse when does it enables you to mount your Lean's backwards to the camera. This one is a manual. This means that this point you lose our camera functions. All the electronics that come with your Lean's, they will be unable to focus and change the aperture, vibration reduction and so forth. All that is gone. When you use a reverse ring. Now you can pour a little bit extra money. Get one that includes the electronics and there's four sandwich your lens. So it was a sandwich. Patho will go on to Font side half logo on the back side. And that enable you to mount your Lean's backwards on your camera and still maintain some of your electronic functions. Here you can see a Nikon camera, reptilians mounted bathrooms. But he murders my camera with my Lean's instead of being on like you would normally. It is mounted backwards. Mounted backwards. Now. That gives you the ability to take a 50 millimeter lens and make it into a one to one micro lens. There's to be a one-to-one, the same as my dedicated my Booleans for one-to-one. The pixels can be as good, now, can be as good. But again, it's a cheap alternative if you don't want to invest DNA, true? Microliters, Michael lasers or expensive, they can be aware of tao hours and dollars, give or take. I gave a 1. So this one, they are expensive. A reverse green or a focus filter. We're talking like pin $20, very cheap, very cheap versus $1000 for a dedicated Michael aliens. Now when pick an owl, your focus close-up focus filter. Or your reverse meaning you have to know the size of the front of your lens, because not all lenses all the same. My 50 millimeter, the threads of this Lean's this 58 millimeter. You can find that by looking underneath your lens cap. My lens cap says 58 millimeter. There are five looked at my 85 millimeter lands. Their heads are 67 millimeter of clearance or bigger. And if I go to my Zoom, my 200, it had a 77 millimeter. It is massive. So you have to be no width size P, threads you need. So you can buy the correct one. By the correct one. Cld say 58 is a CPA right there. That's because they will feel the thread pattern of a 58. That's not to be confused with the focal length. I'm not talking about a 50 millimeter, 85 millimeter, 200 millimeter. That is different. I'm talking about the thread pattern on the front of your lens fiber flood. Some lenses actually say it too as well. Here you can see this says that this is a Nikon 50 millimeter focal center there. But I look around on the back side though. It says 58. And that's talking about the threads in the firm. So that'll be true for reverse wings or for your close-up filters. Another word of caution. The squares for paper thin mountain lenses backwards. You introduce unwanted stress and it can be harmful to the flow of your camera posteriorly to the front of your land. So be cautious if you go do reverse route because they are somehow a lot of stress on them threads. Okay, so the next option would be to use extensive tubes spacing to four. By far your best option. If I had to choose between both close-up filters, We various rings for accessing tubes are virtues expensing two, if they are by far your best option for one, your Levene's is mountain normally onto the camera. It's not in me versus Mountain normally. What's the benefit of an assessing tube or assessing to get the Leon's off of the camera. The further you can get that Leon's off for the camera, the more the magnification. That's how mindful photography works, and that's how these work. Dedicated multiple lenses. But you get the objects further away from the camera, further away. Some of them are manual or automatic. Let me show you what they look like. Here you can see a set of extensive tubes now obsessing tubes do not have any grass and on they are hollow and they usually come in sets of 12 or 20, 36. You can use them individually or you can stack on, just like we did with the close-up filters. They are stackable. This one said here is a manual sets and you do not have any electronics. So you lose all function of your land. However, you can for a little bit more money by some that do retain electronics in your lenses were punching as normal. Okay. So let's say you decided to go with extensive tubes. You went to cheat well, or you went with a reverse ring and again, you went to cheat well, you did in art for any of their legs phonics. How can I still maintain my focus? Where you have to manually do it because you can't change the focus on the camera. So not automatic. So you're going to have to manually adjust your focus manually or walk back and forth until the amylase comes into focus in at that point, when it comes into focus, click in, take the picture. You'll have to manually do it. You can adjust the aperture on your camera by using if your camera has a dedicated button for depth of field, depth of field preview, my camera does, I can hit that button. What that button does after I set my aperture. So I got millions on normally Java lens on. I set the aperture. I hit that law. That loved that aperture into place. Dni take the Leon's offered the camera lens will stay locked. Never stayed locked at the amplitude. I set it out. I mounted to my extensive tube for my reverse ring in an unmount all that back to the camera and that keeps it locked into place. A lot of work a lot of work. Have an adult to it manually. Tomorrow suggests in it you can afford the ones that include the electronics. They are much better option but not required. Now the Cloud, you can use the cheaper wines. And you're limited on what you can do unless you want to take the extra steps to work around it. Our next option. So let's say you wanted to use this sensing tubes and you don't want to use reverse ratings, you don't want to use close-up filters. There is another option is called a Bella. And what Abella does, Abella goes in-between the camera body and Napoleon and this on a, well. So the rail moves back and forth, back and forth. And it's pretty much get nucleons after the camera. So as you move it along that well, the layers just further away or closer in that increases your magnification. The further away, the more the magnification closer doesn't, That's the magnification. Me show you a picture of one of those look like this is a Bella. And you can see how it's mounted in between the camera and the Leon's in a little knob at the bottom, the snow now down at the bottom, you turn that in. It's very precise. And it moves to Leon's off of the camera by enable you to achieve my photography. So those are just some basic options to enable you to convert a regular Lean's team to a micro lens. Are they as good as a dedicated MacLean's now? But unless you're a professional photographer and you really need excellent photos, these are excellent options for the hobbyists. Hobbyist doesn't need to spend UP thousand dollars do achieve Michel photography. Like 20 dollar set of adapters will do just fine. Okay, in our next unit, we'll go on to look at other options for accessories. Camera gear that are faint would be very beneficial in your journey down the road or Michael potassium. 9. Other Gear for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So in this lesson, I want to talk to you about some other camera gear that I feel would be beneficial for your macro photography. These are just my opinion, but I find helps me my photography and hopefully some of them will help you as well. So the first thing I want to talk about is a tripod. Macro photography is very demanding as it is, because when we are magnifying us, thus a great degree or area of focus or depth of field is so bays are thin. That is very hard to stay stabilized in the addict, the slightest bit of movement, focus off. So I recommended by part. Now any type R will work. But what I personally, but it can be is one. It does not have a center post. Let me show you a picture on but iPad I'm talking about here you can see this tripod. It can lay flat out onto the ground to enable you to get extremely low. Because somebody, your subjects might be on the ground like a mushroom or flower or above. So being able to get very low, it stays stable, is a good benefit. I can't show you the tripod I use because unfortunately my camera is mounted to it. Now the next item I highly recommend is way to remote fire your camera. Camera shake in just the act of pushing the button. Pushing a button to cause just a little bit of vibration camera shake. My camera actually has infrared infrared sensor right there. And there's also another one on the back right there. So what that enables me to do is remote remote fire. And I can be 1520 meters away even further. And I can remote buyer my camera without ever having to touch it. Now, if your camera does not have the capability of doing remote buyer, most cameras have ports on decidable. They usually have four. It's there's a port there they are. I got all kinds of ports up and down the side. And that will enable you to hook up a wired remote trigger. Let's take a quick look at those. So here's the first one is the one I use because my camera can use a wireless remote. But if your camera cannot, you can get remote hookups. They just plug in to the port on the side of your camera and an you to fire the shutter release without having to physically touch the camera. Now if you don't have either remote, there's other options you can use. You can lock the mirror up if your camera does there, or you can use a timer to count down so that the camera automatically takes the picture. But there's other work around. But I highly recommend if you can have or get a remote to use it for your mock-up photography. The slightest bit of camera shake and cause motion blur in your pictures. The next item I recommend has to do with flash. I highly recommend you have a good flashcard. This is the speed like SB 899, and this is the big boy then nikon makes. You don't have to build this elaborate, this extreme, but this is the one I use, not actually have a battery pack that ASL closing to the fun of it right here. That enables me to hook up a battery pack so that I can use this like a scroll. I can chain buyer pictures just as fast as my camera will go in the class to keep up with it. Now, another option would be to have the camera and the flash separate. Not having the flat on the camera directly, but instead using remote virus for your camera, I happen to have a blood those one album mounts to the camera. It's just the transmitter. They'll it'll just mail right here to the camera hot shoe. I can mount a glass on top of it if I wanted to. But in this case, I want to fire. My last step would be and allocate the me versus the receiver. Now, I can mount disks to a tripod. In remote fire the camera when I hit my camera shutter release. The class can be off-camera. Very beneficial. When taken. Macro photography, light, light is very materiality and light is very important in medical photography because most of the time looks fine and good if most of the picture in focus as possible. That means that our aperture is very tiny pinhole that we've got that set like ADA, f 16, they'd be an f. 11. 12 is still very high to very tiny. So not very much light is coming in. We have to introduce light in to the picture as much as possible. So those are remote flashes. Now, transmitter receiver, the receiver goes onto your flash here the transmitter goes onto your camera. There's also other options, instead of using a speed light like what I like to use. You can also use wine were the controls mouse to the heart shoe on your camera, and the end of the light, this is a ring light and it goes around the end of your land in that neighborhood, you to have light right there at the top of your camera that is isolated and just lift up your subject. Another option, this one here also mouse to the heart shoe on your camera. It goes around the Lean's 2s globalized, one on each side that you can get as well. So being able to introduce light, mean imaging, introduce light into your picture you're seeing is very beneficial. So I recommend you have some kind of flash unit to help you with your photography. The next item I would like to talk about is a focusing well and what that does there, especially when you're doing like photo stacking, photo stacking. And what it does, it enables us to move the camera. Light. Very slight increment for taking multiple pictures. But sometimes if we need or we run the entire picture to be in focus, That's impossible of a single shot because of that razor thin focus plane. So we would have to take multiple pictures. We may have to pay as little as three or four, up to maybe 30, even a 100 depending on where we are photographing and trying to maintain, let's say 3030 pictures to photo stack into one gets you merge all of those 30 pictures. You merge them into one single picture. And you're having to refocus on a different part of your picture, a different part of the different parts or different part, different part, different part. Pretty tedious. Making those jumps can be hard. So having a focus well, where you can actually click and move a meal meteoritic time, and keep everything accurate and in-sync comes in very handy. So this is a focusing well, mainly use or focus stacking pictures focused that game. So here it is. This is a focus. Well, you can see how it has a knob on it in a worm gear than they were asked to move the camera very slightly to my next item is, but we call a third hand. And what a third hand doeth is alligator clips, and it enables you to hold your object. Here's the one IU, this is the exact one that I use. It has USB plug in, has a built-in light, also has a magnifying glass, and I don't use the magnifying glass for taking the pictures, but I use it for setting up my shot Porter graphene, very tiny item. So having a magnifying glass to help you set up your shot and get everything lined up where you want it. It's very convenient. My nozzle has one of the alligator clips as a light, a flashlight. And I can use that as my want to shine a beam of light into a specific area and you'll see me do that. You'll see that when we get into the hands-on presentation, because we're going to do some actual hands-on photography, will take in section of a picture, those alligator clips are not going to be in the picture, especially when you learn how to resist them and how to set up your shots. You can set them up in such a way that the eclipse warning hold in the very outer edges, the parts that we don't really care that are in the picture anyways, because we're focused in on the heart of our subject, I highly recommend a third hand, the very cheap picking up on Amazon. Or you might be able to find them locally. Very cheap, not too expensive. But they will make holding your very tiny objects a lot easier. Okay, so that was typing about a third, third hand, but what would be next? But next week I recommend, well, personally, for me, the last item, IBEC a mean, is a lightbox. I actually use a light part. You can get light bounces. Again, barely cheap. Somebody that can be pretty expensive, but you can get them fairly cheap. I've seen them on Amazon in this light bulbs support model a box tabletop. Now the good thing about a light bulb is it lets you control the light. More. Light bounces around, it's nine to bark. So at ruminates in it likes everything up. Most light boxes have built in light of their ability and you don't have to worry about external light. With our light bulbs. You don't even have to worry about a flash head or, you know, the flash units I was talking about earlier. All your light is right here. You turn these lights on and put your subject inside of it. You're going to have all the light you need for your macro photography is can be literate, nice and bright. You don't have to buy one. They are extremely easy to make. You can make them homemade. Let me show you one that is homemade. This is out of a core, more mass. There's a cardboard box and a piece of poster board clipped inside Eclipse clip to the back of it to give a nice backdrop. And there are interchangeable. You could put a black, blue, red and pull it over. You run up there. And I'm going to show you two more tricks when we're getting to the water bubble photography and acellular small tweaks for you. Clip a picture to the back of your backdrop, your background in that shows up in the water bubble or even not doing work to bubble photography. Maybe your photograph and up louder or the other or something, but the background will be blurred out to make it into esteem backdrop. Now, how do I make, how did you make this? And you just cut out and you can like tracing paper. Tracing paper works extremely well. Double it up. You could use a single but doubled up to two sheets of tracing paper and just tape it to the outside of the box and then just take two ordinary lamps, just paid to lamps or one lamp being put one on the top if you want, one on each side, and it will illuminate in light of the subject just perfectly fine. I use a light bulbs all the time. I use a light box and you'll see remediating to the projects that I use it not all the time. I don't always use it, but I do use quite a bit and I like to use for the backdrop black. You alot of my photography, my Michael pictures, the background is black. I like that black background, but I do use color occasionally and I do use bite. It just depends on what I'm photographing. So there you have it. Those are just some simple tools and accessories the Allies used. And that is by no means the entire list. There's a bunch of stuff that I may have mentioned and there are some that are may have mentioned that you disagree with. And that's perfectly fine. I'm just giving you my list stopped at IU. I find beneficial. In our next lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about software, both paid and free, that will help you in your Michel photography to you in that lesson. 10. Your Macro Photography Gear Check List: Hi, welcome back. So we've been talking about cameras, IR, camera, the lenses turn in a normal lending to remake Booleans. Other photography year that I feel would be beneficial for you. So this wraps up this section on gear, but I feel would be most beneficial to you. Now in our next section, we're going to go into photography software. But before we do that, but I would like for you to do, is I'd like you to do the call to action. I want you to get the gear checklist that I provided for you. Now I want you to go through your gear in, fill it out. By now, the minimum focal distance working the limitations of your lenders will f-stop minimum amplitude. Maximum amplitude is our respect that you can fill out like gear. Do you have, what do you do you still me. If you desire to try and acquire this external gear today, you can use it alongside of me when we started doing the actual project. Please go ahead and do so, so that you'll have it on hand when the time comes to that wraps up every day in a bow gear. I'll see you in the next section when we start talking about software. 11. Introduction Photography Software: Hey, welcome back. So now that we've gotten through photography gear, Let's talk about software. Now what I'm gonna do a deep dive into software in this section, I want to do is talk to you about the software that I've used currently and software I've used in the past. Software that is free and software that is paid. We will look at the differences in the benefits of the pave software versus the alternative counterpart to it, which would be the free version. All the software is going to be talking to you today. You can get a reward discussed the differences. We will not go into each software specifically, as I will save that for when we actually are doing the hands-on portion of the course. So let's talk software. 12. Basic Fundamentals Photography software: Hi, welcome back again. So the fundamentals of photography software. Now there are different types of software. Some software enable you to take control of your camera, phone, your laptop, whether that be by a cable or wirelessly. And then you have software where you edit, editing software, like late world for instance. So we go in and fix white balance and color corrections and exposure, take out noise, add sharpening, stuff like that. Then you have advanced software like Photoshop, where you go when you do advanced editing. Now the majority of the time, I don't use Photoshop is too slow and I just don't meet it. Everything I'd need to do I can do in Lightroom. So I use Lightroom about 95 percent of the time, but I do use Photoshop occasionally. Now, surprisingly, I don't use Photoshop portfolios. Focus stacking is too slow, like I mentioned earlier, I asked Lee use iliacus. It's way faster. Nothing. You can't do it in Photoshop as you can. And in this course I'm going to show you both want to show you in lead time. And I'm going to show you Photoshop. And you can decide which one you want to use because some of you may already have Photoshop and don't want to invest in yet another program. And that's perfectly fine. I personally use electron. Everyone getting to that. As we get into those lessons when we start talking more about each type of software. Now for all of these softwares, like I mentioned in the introduction for this section, there's alternatives that you can get that are free. I'm not gonna show and demonstrate those as well. So if you don't have either no software at all, you can get the free versions and they would get the job done. Are they as good now? But for the hobbyist who is just experimenting with my chromatography, there are good enough. I'm very impressed with a lot of the images that I have produced using the free software. And actually for my taken control of my camera and using my laptop to do my pictures and my focus stacking, I actually buying that a free version I'm going to show you does extremely good and I end up using it more than I use the helix on remote. This is the counterpart to the account token. So sit back, relax as we take a little bit deeper explanation into each type of camera photography software. 13. Remote Camera Control Software "Helicon Remot"e: Hi, welcome back. So the first demonstration that I want to show you is the camera software apps for controlling your camera from your computer. We will look at Yukon First Name we were looking at DC KM. Second, the affiliate com. I'm going to use my Nikon D 7 thousand picked up by a USB cable. When I did was to a DC KM. I use my Nikon D 750 book done wirelessly. Now both programs, Iliad and Desi KM, will enable you to hook up either by USB cable or wirelessly. So I'm going to demonstrate both methods, one with one camera, one with the other. The first one is going to be Healy a car. Notice it says that there is no camera connected. So when I turn on my camera there, so I'm going to do now, you know how it kicked in and it recognized my camera. Now, it automatically opened up the live view, which is what you're seeing. Here. We've seen a library of now you don't see anything. So let me here. Out of focus. You had a camera's trying to focus in. It can't focus in you. I don't know why. Remember how I told you the smaller the opening on your aperture, less light, daddy, they booked to come in. If you look over here onto the y, Here's my camera controls. My aperture is currently set at 51. Let's drop that down to say 5.6. Now let's try it out. Autofocus again. Still kind of dark, right? What happens if I turn on my lights to see if that helps? Now I have my studio lights on. Laura, you see what I see automatically has got an image that's out of focus again. Okay, so I have 5.6. I'm now able to start capturing my subject so I can control focus. I can change my f-stop, I can change my ISO. I can change whether I want to shoot involved or JPEG. I can even adjust the exposure values up or down or from right here. Now, the next thing I want to look at what Crick is the focus stacking, because we will be using focus stacking. And if you look right here of, let's say a and B, if I want to set my focus that game, I can set like a if I wanted to set it for say right there as my starting point of focus, meaning to my desk. So let's say that was my starting point and I wanted to lock that in. Now everything I wanted to move back further, see my arrows up here. So I can move like that or I can move the other way. That looks pretty good. I got dad loved and save as fathers point. Okay. Do I have loved in a and B? In the back of the picture? If you look right here, it shows that I need 65 pictures now. I don't want to shoot 65 pictures. To say shots. I can come down here and I can specify, let's say I only want tn. So let's put in a value of t and so only 110 pictures. Now if I want to see what is being focused or what is being captured, me, I turn on focus right here. And what comes up in blue is, but it's going to be in focus at that focal point. So now I simply have to do is go up to the top where it says start shooting. Or I could take picture if I just want to take a single picture. But I can say start shooting. And the camera will start taking a series of ten pictures or however many I stratified. The house be focusing. It'll be focus is changed. Your points, you have the blue is changed and on the screen, the blue is highlight was being in focus at this time. So it's cycling two different focal points in. It's going to generate clean picture, since that's what I specified. Rain is done. Then I can merge these two pictures into one using either the Photoshop, using healer part focus for use in another free program, which we'll get into all those in due time. There we go. We are done. Ten pictures have been taken. So now I can get here yes. And read it will automatically do it automatically open it up in focus because I don't want to do right now. 14. Remote Camera Control Software "DigiCamControl": Welcome back. So now we're gonna look at DC can't control. Now in order to use the wireless when either program your camera has to support it. Or my D 750, It does. If you look right here, it says wifi. So my cameras supports wireless. I've got my camera mounted back long too much five-part set back up just like idea with to D7 1000. Now this time I'm going to open up DZ KL. Okay, so does it count is opened up. Now in order for you to connect and to recognize my camera, I have to go to the top. If I had a cable hookup, it to be automatic, the appeal, I have to go to the WiFi, open that up, and then I have to vote says Connect provider. Actually go down and find my camera. Have I had to turn on new Wi-Fi function on my camera. And you can see it right here, Nikon camera. As soon as I click on that and here, connect. There you go. My D 750 is now connected. Just like in helium town remote. I have camera functions here as well. If you look over here on the left, you can see my counterparts. And the first thing I wanna do is turn on live view. So let's go critic top and hit the LB live view. And this screen pops up and nurses word IMC. And this is looking through my camera back in just like before. I'm currently set at F4. I can drop that down to whatever I want. I wanted to go as high as 45. Probably want to do that, but let's say I wanted to go to F3 and see how it instantly changed in previous screen. I am now at if Tn. Let's go back to 5.6 and wants to screen again wass or change. See how it changed. Can you know it's the focus changed to look at the focus for a second. You see the little green square Jasper I'm focusing app and see how this is in focus. But look at Cyclops for the date window, see how it's out of focus. Now let's go something bigger. Let's start go to F 22. Now notice how the cyclops is starting to come into focus. The smaller that opening, the moderated in-focus, Let's go back to 5.6 again. See now the cyclops is out of focus. I have control of my f-stop. I have controlled my white balance, my spot metering, my focusing on a single focus or continuous focus. All kind of controls for doing my camera. Now, just like in daily economy, we have focus stacking rocks I really loved to do. Let's go back over here to our preview in the middle, you can see at the top I have my autofocus and real I click my mouse out all my screen. See how I'm clicking my mouse. In where I put my mouse and click where the square is. That's what we're going to article resign. So I'm out of out of focus right there. There we go. So at are focused on now, if I wanted to take a picture, I can, I can go ahead and hit capture. And wow, I just took a picture. Now for focus stacking purposes. Let's go down here where it says photo stack in advance and you have photo stacking simple. I personally like to use advance, gets a little bit more control. So, but I have to do is I have two lochia and what's my starting points or worse, the closest thing to me. So let me go click right here. This is probably the closest thing to me, me focusing in on that. They focus the end now I can lock that he ends. I can go ahead and click law. Now, the earliest date for me, our imaginal Power BI like back over here, that's poverty furthers. So let's move or let's use our arrows to move. See how I can move my arrows back and forth. It's like so, just like so. So I want to get that back piece in focus that looks like that's about good, just like you see in focus. So I can go ahead in Love, Daddy. And so using my arrow keys, I can lock the idea. Now I have a font point and a bad point. But look what it says. This thing is 500 pictures to go from the point in the font that I sat for, my starting point to the point in the back. But as I said, it's my only point. It was to do 500 pictures. That's a lot. If I jump to pictures out of time, I can drop that down to 250 pictures. Now what I'd like to do, I'd like to just manually go in here and let's say I wanted to manually go in. And let's set this to, let's say 25. Now it's going to jump 20 pixels out of time. That's the focus step. And it's going to take 25 pictures. Now, just like when I did with the other program, he Lia Khan remote, I'm going to just set this to clean, is just going to jump 50 out of time. Now, wait time, but wait time is, is how long does it wait between these picture before it takes the next one? That's very important because camera shake that the camera it has the slightest bit of vibration, your pictures will not be in focus. So two seconds gives the camera time to settle down before it takes the next picture. Now I can hit Preview if I wanted to, I could go here and hit preview to see what it's doing is showing you a preview of the picture. It says it's a cycling through all or if so, it's cycling through the pictures. We're going to run and hit stop there. So if I wanted to ready to do my product to stack, now gets his start. Just like with paleoclimate remote, it will take a series of t and pictures. And there we go. So we'll have more tech or ten pictures. I'll fast-forward to the end of the cycle. Okay. It says focus stacking, finished. So I can just simply click, Okay. And it'll put it into a folder for me that I can now open up in my editing software or my merging software if I want to go straight into there. Okay, so that was a look at Healy economy mode. And DZ can control. 15. Photo Editing Software "Adobe Lightroom": Hi, welcome back. So in our last lessons, we learned how to take control of our camera using our computer, using Beulah clammy mole or DC camp control. Now, let's take those pictures that we took and put it mean to afforded the editing program so that we can clean them up a little bit. Now, the two options I'm gonna be showing you. One is a pave, that's light room. And the other one did they have a sample free version which is dark table. So we will start out with light room first. Okay, Here you can see I am in light room. So I need to bring in those pictures. So I can go over here to the left which says folder. Drop that down, add folder, look for where that photo is. In this case, it's on my desktop in the Edit Staff were right here. So these are the pictures that I took two days and I'm going to select that folder in your see, those pictures will come up yours to Kim pictures that we took. Now I guess sampling. Make sure all my check. If I don't want a particular one, I don't uncheck it. But just make sure they are all check. Go down to the bottom right corner and get input. Now Lightroom will import those pictures in. And you can see I have the pictures now this one doubt of spatter talk is member we focus stack these. So if I go up doing you, I think fine. This one has a little bit of a focus, this line and this line. And what I like to do, to do my quick edit, Find the one that's in focus the most. That's the, let's say the last one, the last one a type is in focus to most. So that's where I started and replied, Well, I can add edit all of these. So if I went actually batch edit all of them, I could just hold down shift and click the last one in out of highlight all of them. Now I can bats, edit all my pictures, but I can do in light room under the Basics tab. I can check in, fix white balance. I can fit if exposure, contour my highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, I can vibrance and saturation, dehaze clarity, texture. And are there next tab, I have Tone Curve, which enabled me to go in and just add an S curve, color grading, which we're not going to get into India. This, this is just an overview of the software that I use, not the lesson on how to use it. Details and sharpening and noise reduction, lens correction. That is something I'll do. Bath edit on every single one of my pictures. Especially when focus stacking, transformation. I'm not gonna do any adjustments. You don't want to alter too much. Word of caution, if you start out between pictures to merge the stack and classes could be hindered. Affects again, VNET and grain not gonna do anything there and then calibration member bottom. Now one other thing I might do is up in the Basic panel where it says upload file. I'll click that and hit Browse any and I'll come down to my Pacific Cloud files, which I have to D7 thousand here. And I'll click that and I'll go ahead and apply that flow file. And that just sets my camera settings for the pictures. Make sure everything is the way it should be in camera colors and so forth. To outgrow heading, hit that, and it flows. Okay, so basic edits, I don't do any major edits at this point. When I'm doing focus that in our Week 2, I get to final image back to what's my next option? Well, from here, I can go up to the top where it says photo and I can go down and hit Edit in. Now if you're going to do focus stacking, you're going to want to open adds layers in Photoshop. If you're doing just an individual picture, you can gets opened normally. But if you want to stack these and merge them into one using Photoshop, you have to hear it open as layer in Photoshop. Now to put these picture as a layer, if you're going to use here part focus versus another software will run, be talking about. For that one, I will go over here to File on the far left and our dropdown two essays export with presets in here, I will select the LEA can't focus in Italy imported into focus so that I can merge them all together into one. So that's just a basic overview of light. Well, next we will take a look at dark table, which is a complete version. The alternative to language. 16. Photo Editing Software "Darktable": Hi, welcome back. So we just got done talking in a bow night world. Now we're going to look at a program that is very similar to like them. Cold dark table. The difference is dark table is 103%. Is it as good as light room? Yes and no. It depends on who you talk to. I have used dark table a lot in my photography career. And there are a lot of things that dark table can do that like wound care. Which one's more easier? I think Lightroom is easier and it's more user-friendly. But that doesn't mean that you can't get the job done. Read.table and remember, dark table is free. So let's take a look at dark table. Okay, so here we have dark table. Now, just like with like room, the first thing I have to do that guardian get my pictures into dark table. So I'm going to go up top or one left where it says copy and import. I'm going to click on that. And then I'm gonna come over here in the center where it says places and hit the plus sign. That's going to let me go to my desktop editing software engineer and the pictures that I took earlier today. Now I can hit Open and it will open those pictures into dark table. And here you go. Here you can see the pictures, okay, here you can see that I have those ten pictures opened up in your cluster bottom, just like when we were in light room. So I can go in and now I can start editing these pictures. If you look over on the left, just I can like boom, you have your deadline, different things that you can do. Over on the right. Again, just like, like well, you have your different functions that you can do. Different tabs, right? Balance, contrast, exposure, Lens Correction, sharpness, just like in light room, a little bit different setup. There's a learning curve to use dark table. Like I said, I think Light room is you more user-friendly? I have not found anything in light room that I can't do in dark table. Table can do it. So this is dark table. You can't export our stroke to be a clinical case or Photoshop. Okay, that was just a very quick look at dark table. Again, I'm not going into any major editing details with any of these softwares. I use my like show you a basic overlook and show you what your options are. Next, we will look at Photoshop. 17. Photo Editing Software "Adobe Photoshop": Welcome back. So now it's time to talk about Photoshop. Photoshop is a very powerful program. However, he too has its limitations and can have a very hard learning curve. I personally don't use Photoshop too much and retain. I like to do I can do in Lightroom. But if I have to, I do have Photoshop on hand. Now to open up those same images that we have been working with. If you try to open them straight up in Photoshop, they're going to go in as individual pictures. You need them to go in as layers. So the easiest way to do that, you start out with light will and import them in as layers. So here you can see our main light room and I've got all ten pictures highlighted. So I'm just going to go up to the top to photo, glob down to say edit in here, open as layers in Photoshop. If you'd, like I said, if you try to do this straight into Photoshop, it would blow them up as individual photos, and that is not what you want. Photoshop is very slow. If you've got plenty of time on your hands, that's great for me personally. I like you. Hey, Lia can't focus is faster. So now that all the images have been loaded into Photoshop, you're going to want to highlight, make sure every single one of them are selected. Go up to Edit, come down to align, auto align layers. Then make sure you click my R0 and hit Okay, and that will go through and auto align. Make sure all the layers are lined up correctly. And there we go. Now all the layers are lined up correctly. Okay, so now the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to go back to edit again. And this time we're going to come down and hit Alt or blame layers. Now it knows that I'm doing a stacked enemies. Now photoshop will blend all ten of those images into one picture. This is very slow and time consuming. And if you have more pictures like dirty 40 or 100, you can go eat dinner, watch a movie, and come back. That's low. That's another reason why I personally use the LEA can't focus because it's way faster. Okay, so after R0 blend tool has done its function, you'll notice that it has put a mask on every single one of the layers. And let you see and right is red is in focus. Now We have a motion picture at the very top, that lighting just go over to File, Save and it will send that picture back over into light room. I can finish my edit besides just the photo stacking. Some of the other things I want to point out about Photoshop or down the left side, you can see all your different tools. We're not going to get into actual editing. That's not what this lesson is about. Photoshop is a very powerful program, but you can learn how to use it properly. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk to you about is GIMP. Now, GIMP is a free program, operate similar to Photoshop. Ronnie, One thing that I found that you cannot do in GitHub, that you can do in Photoshop is focus stacking. You can do it, but it's not automatic. You have to manually align all the layers up. You have to manually go in and make your mask for your focus is very tedious and time-consuming. So I highly recommend you don't try and do focus stacking in yep. For our other photo editing functions, that does just fine. But focus stacking is a downfall of guilt. It can be done but not easily. So next, let's look at DLP. 18. Photo Editing Software "GIMP": Hi, welcome back. Now let's talk about gear. Now if I recommend you don't try and do focus stacking in damp, but it can be done. So let's take a look at okay, so here you can see I have gant opened up. And just like in Photoshop, if you look down the left side, you have all your tools. Some of them may expand to give you other tool functions. We go up to the car and go a class for you. You can see if filters, Ringo in Breuer and other artistic effects. The good thing about Gambia, if you can get add ions and plugins in GIMP is all heard of Sam Three program. Most of the airlines and plugins can be found for me, some of them you have to pay for. So we have lots of control in Gimp, just like an Adobe very powerful program. Now, we'll correctly, if you want to bring in a picture, you can go over to File, Open and open up your picture. If you want to try to attempt to do focus stacking, you can hit open as layers that you have to do. Layers just like you do in Photoshop. So I'm open and all these up as layers. Ok, so here you can see that all came pictures have been imported into Gimp. Now there's no auto align function in Gambia. Can't auto align the layers like we did in Photoshop. So you're going to have to manually go through an auto align or the layers. There's no auto blend in full in bmp like there is in Photoshop. So you're going to have to go through each one of these layers one-by-one and apply a mass, go to the layers, go down to mass here to apply a mask. And you're going to have to mask our BS1 manually one-by-one. It's very tedious job necessarily, I recommend that you don't try and do focus stacking using Yelp. It can be done better. You better have a lot of time on your hands. This is not an easy process. It's not automatic, like when using Photoshop, okay. That is again, very powerful program. Just don't try and use it for photo stack in, but for other photo editing. Trick photography that people like you do with Photoshop, GIMP can do it. It has all the tools for class the left side and a class the top. So that's a quick look at gamma. Now, the next piece of software we're going to look at will be helium, can focus, which is my preferred method for doing focus stacking. 19. Focus Stacking Software "Helicon Focus": Hi and welcome back. So we're down to our last two programs and they are focus stacking. Now I've already talked about Photoshop, so we're not going to talk about it again. The next two programs for focus stacking will be ealier, can't focus and combine the IEP. The Locard focused is my preferred method. And I'm going to talk to you about that 1 first. Combined zp is a free program, very basic, no bells, no resource, but it can do focus stacking. We'll talk about it last. And that will end this section on photography software name. We will go into cameras settings. Next, we're getting close to actual hands on projects. I'm getting excited. I can't wait to historic do in there because that's when the fun begins. Let's talk to her help. Ilya can put gifts. Now, there's two ways. You can bring your picture's going to Hillary can't focus because he'll expand. Focus is a stand alone program. So you can open up electron focus in and you can go to File and Open, Open Images and you can bring them all in manually. The other method is using light world races, but I normally do because I started out in light room, in go to helium, can't focus. And then back to late mover for my final edits. So in that case here I have light room. So I'm going to make sure I've got all t and m is highlighted. I'm going to go up here to File export with preset, and I'm going to pick Helio can't focus. And here we go. So we are in hilar can't focus and you can see my ten pictures coming down the right side. Now the next thing I wanna do is render these all together, merge them into one. Now there's three methods you can do. Method a, weighted average, method B, depth map and methods see pyramid. Now by default, it comes on method B with the depth map. I recommend you just go with the default settings. They do an excellent job, but you can play around with any of them. You can adjust radius smoothness. What we're gonna do this time is I'm going to actually do all three. And I'm going to do this in real time. I'm not going to cut out. I'm going to do it in real time. You can see just how fast helium card focus is. So let's click on method a, which is the weighted average. In last what happens? I'm going to hit Render. And we are done that fast. It, we ended all ten pictures. It put a picture down on the bottom panel. Now, let's go to be same day. Here we go. Method B. While our burden that fast, one more method, method see resists the pyramid. Here we go. And again we are done. So as you can see, a gets rendered these ten pictures into 13 times with three different methods. Did all three methods faster than trying to do this in Photoshop just one time, deal. I did it three times, three different methods. Now, I can come to the bottom and I can click on each one of these. And I can look at on nine C with one, I like the best. And after I decide which one I like the bears, I go up to the top where it says File, and then I can save or export. That's it. That is how simple it is to use healer card book is very fast, very smooth, very efficient. Next we will look at combined Zp versus the pre-program. No bells or whistles, like I said earlier, it'll be a very quick little demonstration. 20. Focus Stacking Software "CombineZP": Hi, welcome back. Okay, So our last little piece of software is combined Zp. That combined Zp was originally developed for doing microscope photography in hospitals and laboratories so they could record little tiny micro organisms. But it was leather expanded into normal micro photography. So let's take a quick look at combined Zp. Here you can see combined Zp him is stacking software. An first day we have to do, we have to go over the top and we have to hit New. And that's going to enable me to Blaine in my pictures. And there you go. As you can see, the pictures have been brought in. You don't see the pictures in this program, but there they are in there. So our next step is again, go back to the top where it says Align imbalance. You can drop that down. I usually pick pyramid weighted average. It seems to do a good job. Pyramid maximum current, vast arsenal does very well. Let's go with Pyramid maximum contrast. And here go. And here you can see the final result. It's not ideal, it's not great. The other software does a way better job. But this is a free program. If you use one or experiment, somebody, other methods might do a better job. So you have to experiment with the different settings and see which one looks best for you. That is combined Zp, very basic, simple program, no bells or whistles. Mediocre job. They will photo stack, not that gray, but it will do it. The more pictures you take with this program that vector we are working off of tn pictures. If you took the 3D pictures or 40 pictures, then this program would stack a lot better than there's more detail for it to decipher. Okay, that wraps up this section. In our next section, we will start talking a bout camera settings. See you in that one. 21. Your Photography Software Check List: Hi again. So before we move on to the next section, let's take a quick minute to evaluate where software we have or you using the software that I demonstrated, or you're using something else. All the software I demonstrated can be downloaded and try it for free. Some of them are free forever. Some of them you have to pay for after the trial period. So I recommend that you find something that works for you and make a softer object lives and honor, soft verb check clears, put down what the benefits are. Closing times, connect photo stack. Can it not photosphere candidate Baghdadi, can it not that you can't control your camera or not control your camera. All these are important was to speed factor if time is not relevant to you. The end goin with Photoshop is that X-linked choice. If you want something that is fast in a little bit more user-friendly, really can't focus might be the choice for you. If you're on a tight budget and you weren't 100% of three, then I would recommend DC can offer your computer for stacking and near and gone with combined Zp. You know, it's not very great. Say 103% options. You can do your editing and dark table or procedure, or both free programs. My personal recommendation will leave for you to subscribe to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom explaining 999 a month. And you get both programs. And you can do every day. That is our photography software checklist. But can your software do and can't do? And are you familiar with it? I recommend you practice and get familiar. So they are the functions that we are doing. This comes second nature. See you in the next section. 22. Introduction Camera Settings for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So now that we've talked about camera gear, but I recommend you use, even if you don't have a claim micro lens, there are other options that you can use workarounds. We've also talked about software. Software that enables you to take control of your camera from your computer. You can get in and do a little bit more fine, intimate detail. In macro photography, it is very hard to hand hold a camera, especially when you're working with so say DNE razor area, that depth of field and trying to steady that camera in, hold it and move can be a little bit cliffs, little bit hard. I break a mean. You use a tripod, sample, targetable, a terrier, never user type part. They like to do everything in hand-held. To me. That's just boosting their ego in real-world. Work. Smarter, not harder. And that's always been my model. Work smarter, not harder. If I can use a tripod and if I can use a computer to help me photo stack, instead of having to do it myself manually turn a focusing well or try and move baby steps with my camera. I'm going to use the software and I'm going to let the program do it, work smarter, not harder. So I'm not going to boost my ego and try and make you think I'm some great, fantastic photographer to do all this handheld called the kanban went the end. Well, hold on us, be laid in the other. And I'm doing all of Vietnam doing a balancing act. And I, and the circus or my a photographer. Another card one night in circuits, work smarter, not harder. In this section we're just going to Carter bow starting points. These are not written in stone. These are not concrete. You're just starting points, jumping points, you get you started. And we will adjust up or down as needed as we progress through the rest of the course. So if you're ready, let's talk about camera settings that I recommend you start with. And then go from there. 23. Basic Fundamentals Camera Settings for Macro Photography: Hey, welcome back. So now let's talk about some basic fundamentals of camera settings. Now the main thing in camera settings is the exposure pyramid. Here is the exposure pyramid. Now this is true and our photography doesn't matter if you're doing macro photography, read and photography, portraits, scenery doesn't matter. This is basic fundamentals of photography. There are three defining factors that determine whether or not you get a correct exposure and a good picture or ISO base your look over here on the left of the pyramid. Iso, the lower the ISO, ISO 100, you have less noise, but the picture is also darker, will be darker. As you claim, that ISO value of say, all the way up to 6400, you introduce more noise, more grainy. Your pictures, they start predicting away, but they are brighter. The sensor on your camera is more sensitive to the light. Now let's go to the other side. Shutter speed. Shutter speed or 11, ten, hundreds I was circling your pictures will be darker but you have less motion blur, your freezing your subject. As we start slowing down now shutter speed, say all the way down to 1 eighth of a second, we introduce more and motion blur. More cameras shape, but our pictures become brighter because the shoulder is staying open longer. Keep working our way around. So now let's talk about aperture. At an f 11, having your amplitude closed down to just a very tiny pinhole, you have a deeper depth of field. Everything is in focus. However, your picture will be darker because the pinhole is so small, not enough light that's going to become any. And as you start work on a class 2, we get to late F1 point. For now our Lean is as wide open. We have a wide or what we call a fast aperture. More light is coming in, but the depth of field now is very shallow. That's really your subject is in focus, but everything else is blurred out. It's out of focus. So this exposure pyramid controls how your pictures are going on. Look. In a way a camera work, especially in automatic or semi-automatic. Say you're in aperture mode. So you set the aperture and the camera will adjust the shutter speed and the ISO accordingly. If you're good exposure, if you're in shutter speed priority, you set the shutter speed and the camera will adjust the aperture and the ISO accordingly. On your dial on your camera, you have shutter speed, aperture, or automatic. Some cameras have program mode, some cameras have seemingly mode, but we're not going to get into all that. So that is talking about the exposure pyramid. We're going to discuss my recommendations. And again, these are just starting points on where do I suggest you start? No, you are not written in concrete that these are the absolute this is but you have to use. We're also going to talk in this unit about what format should I use for my picture? Should I use WOW, or should I use JPEG? That is something that is very important in the fundamentals of typography. Should I use manual focus or should I use automatic folk years? Should I used the live view or should I use a tether to a computer? You know, my stand on that. I used a computer when I'm focused stacking, my eyes are not as good. I'm an art as dirty as I used to be. And I'm not worried about trying to do a balancing that. Remember, work smarter, not harder. So we're going to talk about old in general, steady that I recommend you use in this section and the next section we will getting to Lady after lighting is actual hands on where we actually start doing some projects. I'm excited. I can't wait till we get to that section. 24. Raw vs JPEG, Which One Should We Use in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So for this first lesson, I want to discuss should I be used in LA? Where should I be using J peg? Because of the long argument on which one is better? I personally, I shoot in raw and I'm going to explain in actually show you why. But some photographers like shooting JPEG, and that's perfectly fine too. It's really up to you. The problem with shooting in JPEG though, is you lose control over being able to edit your image. The camera does all the editing for you in the picture that you get, has everything baked into it with wall, you keep all of that law data in, nothing is lost. That's why WOW is considered an destructive war, whereas a JPEG is disruptive. Or because once you process that pixel JPEG, there is no going back. Picture bacon something or cooking. And you have all the ingredients laid out on a table. And you have your spices and herbs in whatever you are going to be putting in your food. That is the wall format. Everything is there. J peg would be the meal after it's completely done. If you forgot something too late, you can't go back and put the eggs into decay if you've forgotten, that is JPEG, once it's done in this state, there's no going back. So wildfires are bigger, they can be 25 megabytes or higher. Here's a boat. And that picture that these marbles or mega pixels margin was a bit. So I have all my megapixels powerful. Now. This little tiny bow represents JPEG. Jpeg, it's only 123 megabytes. Hey, there's my JPEG. These are my pixels, my megapixels. This is how much I'm down in the trash. Don't want either way. Because I took my 25 megabytes, all my pixels, and I converted over to a JPEG which only uses this. Now, this gets stored in the trash. You can't get a map is done. This is your final image. Now because of that, that causes a difference in how much recovery you can get when you're in light world. Let's jump over to Light room and let me show you what I'm talking about. So who we are in light bulb. And if you look over here on a layer, I have two pictures in two different folder, one labeled JPEG and one's labeled wall. Now, what I did is I took my camera, took my camera and I'm running to the menu and I told it to record both law and JPEG at the same time. And I used the highest settings, JPEG fine, I used the highest settings. So it took two pictures, one involved in wanting day period 2. These are exactly identical pictures. So let's look at doing one for JPEG first. I'm going to go to develop in this very dark. I did that on purpose because I'm trying to illustrate a point. This picture is underexposed by three. So yours saying, and what can I recover this way? Yeah. You can recover. We're now saying that we knew worked with JPL that you're completely cut off from being able to do any edits. That's not true. 50 would have to divide in a underexposed I hear a plus 3 value. Boom. I've added a plus three and I can bring back some of that detail. And he would think, wow, what that picture looks. Okay, where's my argument? But let's go do the same thing with the wall. So I'm gonna go back to develop, or excuse me, back to the library. This time I'm going to click onto one. It says, Wow, let's bring it in. Again. It's underexposed, but to me that these are both taken at the same exact time. In ongoing two ways, my exposure value by three on this one, this one looks more natural. Same exact picture. One-shot invol, one-shot in J peg to difference is the one shot. And J peg only had this many marbles left to work with the one shot and law still had all his marbles. He had last needy of his marbles. So he's all 100% there. Now, here's the fun part. We're going to pixel p. I'm going to zoom in in pixel p. So I wanna go back to the first, but I wanna do, I want to reset these. I want to make sure that you know that these have not been adopted in any way. I'm gonna go back to the very bottom. I'm going to hit Reset to their original file format. This is the original file format. If you notice straight lines all the way down, Adobe Color Guide, this is a wildfire, so Adobe Color automatically adjust the temperature and the tint. Now let's go to the JPEG line. There's reset it. There we go. We'll reset back to both of these and reset back and you can see my just down no alterations, nothing. Okay. So again, one more time. You have Commons, the JPA one, There's raised that exposure value backup. Three, go, Let's go back to the wall. One, back to our, again, There's ways that exposure value back up to three. There you go. Now, before we pixel peak, this one looks more natural to me. If I go into the wine, that is the J peg, to me, it looks a little bit more plastic and that's because it has already been processed. It was passed this in the cameras where the camera has baked in the vibrant colors and whatever the camera settings are set on. So it is yes, a little bit more vibrant. It is little bit more background of a picture. Rare as go back to the 14 wall does I admit does look a little bit more flat. That's because while pictures are not processed at all, they are not processed. So you have to process them yourself where the J peg is processed in camera. Now, I personally like having control over my processing. I think I know what I'm after. More than that. My camera does my cameras work in off of a set formula that was programmed into the software that tells that, do this and do that. For jpegs. That might not be what I want. I might want something different. So I like being able to change my settings personally instead of having or do it for me. Okay, so now I went to do some pixel peaking. So I'm going to take, and I'm going to click right here, and this one leaf by the year, I'm going to click see how this picture looks. This is the picture when we zoom in at 300 percent, not a bad looking picture, zoom back out to normal view. Now, I want to jump over to the jpeg and we're going to do the same thing. Here's a J peg to jump over to here. And I'm going to a pixel p when that same spar wall, that looks kind of funny. But do you think, you know why this looks kind of funny? Because there's only a tiny bit, oh, there's only a tiny bit of pixels left. Remember Week 25 megabytes, all of these visits, the law picture. And I only kept a handful of, of I converted it down to a one megabyte virtues like 20, 25 megabytes versus a one megabyte. I've loved all my detail. All my detail has been gone. It's been daughter way. Let's just all that was left after the camera processed it into a J peg. So there's no detail here. Dramatic range. Dramatic means HDR hypomanic wanes. Desperate you get when you are working with a log files, you have every day. When you are working with a J peg, you have what is left over after the processing versus very little. And there's no going back. You can't put back in, but you've taken out law. Buyers are non-destructive or JPEG files are indestructible once it's taken out, that cannot be put back in. So again, yours to J peg it by zooming in at 300 percent and hears though evolve by or if I zoom in 300%, a lot cleaner picture, a lot cleaner picture, you'll still have all my marbles. I haven't lost all my marbles here. Now I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about. As far as DOE colored towel, JPEGS or 8-bit pictures, me say that again. Jay Baer, pegs or 8-bit, whereas wall flowers or 10, 12, 14, dependent on the manufacturer whose camera you're using. So they are bigger beer. The more beer, the more colors, the more colors to more detail. Let's take a look at another example. Here I have a J peg. The JPA. Jpegs have a limited range, CDs, red dotted lines coming down on each side. That is the 8 bit of color range. The losing some of their highlights in losing some of their shadows don't. Lights and darks. That's being cut out of the picture. This is 8-bit. Now let's take a look at wow. Here is, wow, I have all my colors. I'm not losing any day. So I have the full range from the black is the blacks To the right of the rights. That is the difference between while vs JPEG. You don't lose anything when you're shooting in wall. Now, JPA eggs are for photographers who don't want to have to edit. They weren't Dicamba to do everything for them. So that's my argument on Wo vs JPEG. I highly recommend you use Wow, in that news J peg. But it's totally up to you. It's your camera, to your pictures. You do you wanna do? I'm just giving you my advice on what I recommend. 25. Focus, Manual or Auto When shooting Macro Photography: Hey, welcome back. So today Let's talk a little bit more about Michel photography, the very subject. Peoples new excitement. I love macro photography as do a lot of people. I've also seen a lot of people quit Michel photography before they even begin. One of the main veins, the main problems or fluctuates a lot of new people, new colors, new photographers, or old photographers like myself, in my chromatography is focus. It is so hard to get a tack sharp picture, especially when we all work in so close with such a phase you're buying depth of field. A slide is shape the slightest movement and not pictures or out of focus. So how do we combat their role? Hopefully I can give you a little bit of insight on how I like to combat it. If I come to grow my setup. Like in a studio environment, I like to use a tripod with my computer hooked up to DC can control or Delia can remote. That way I'm looking at a big monitor, not this little screen or this viewfinder. And that enables me to fine tune my focusing a little bit better. I can ask so do focus stacking a whole lot easier using the software, then I can manually do it or using a focusing. Well, autofocus works great in software. Because you can focus where you weren't. You can click on the screen with your mouse where you want to focus there and then hit the autofocus. And if it's not quite right, and just to just hit the autofocus, you can load picks you up and make it bigger. By now, point and hit the autofocus. If you focus stacking, you're going to start with closest to you, locked out point even further away, what that point in. And they take a series of photos that you're going to merge together, either in Photoshop, the Locard focus or combines API, whatever software you decide to use. And those are just the three that aren't familiar with. Again, there's others. So out of focus, very useful under the right conditions. Now, this camera setting I recommend is to use single point. This camera might be 1750, has 51 Vocalpoint. I said it on the single-point, single-focus. I don't want the camera trying to jump around and areal track. I wanted to beyond a point that I had designated. In stay there. I use single not continuous for my focusing so I can lock Gideon. Another thing that I do that I break the mean. You do is you set up your back focus if you know it back focus is it's using this button on the back of the camera for your focus as out of focus lock cameras by default and having to focus tidy and with the shutter release. Now that's very bad, especially when you're trying to compose or do Mike will photography. Because you have to push the shutter halfway down, get your focus. Then you have to push it down. The way to take your picture. If you take your finger off the button, you have to start the process for her percent are over again by separating the two separating the two and put in your focus on the back and have in your shutter release just for taking the picture, I can push, lock in my focus, release it. Him anon ready dictated the picture. Take a picture. So I separate them. If you do not know how to set up Back button bogus, please look it up in your manual. I'm not gonna go into that in this lesson because all camera manufacturers or a different. Next we have, should I use manual? And when should I use manual? I highly recommend if you're going to be doing macro photography, you use manual if your hand holding the camera. Again, we would say that again. If you are a hand holding the camera out of focus is terrible. On my phone photography. If you're trying to hold the camera, because the sliders bit of movement, the slightest bit of camera shake. Your picture, you're far autofocus won't be able to lochia. We'll talk about a razor, thin razor. The end focal plane autofocus is not good. The nearest movement going on now in Michel photography. So if your hand holding the camera, put your camera in manual mode. Now, you don't have to sit there and manually turn the focus between all the time, constantly trying to turn now. You can use your body, will talk in very her movements here. So get defocus kind of semi log D and where you need it In in just lightly, just very slightly whack and back and forth, rocking back and forth. When the focused looks the sharpest at its most Crystal point, Snapchat shot, like a cat pouncing, honest way. You can use the live view. I can turn the live view on if I don't want to have my I press through the camera, turn on my live view. Again the same thing. When that picture chest when you see and you think it's by to picture a picture later. And we're going to have an entire section on focus stacking. And we're going to talk about manually focus stacking. We're going to talk about using a focus well, and we're going to talk about using software and a tripod. I showed you a little bit of focus stack in memory was talking about software. But we're going to go into depth, into a deep dive, into focus stacking. And there's an entire unit dedicated just to that. And I'm going to show you all method's done manually, focus stacking, taking your pictures to do an automatic again, using the software. So that's my conclusion on should I use automatic or should I use manual? If you're hand holding the camera? Mean you get familiar with manual practice. Practice makes perfect practice. Moving back and forth, just air inverse slope slightly, ever so slightly, or turn into focus. By hand. Try to not use automatic if you're handholding because there'll be jumping over the place and close magnified pictures. Autofocus is terrible. On the other hand, if you are stable, you have your camera on a tripod. You can use automatic if you have a terribly to your computer. Definitely be all means use automatic focus stacking works great for software. In automatic is your friend. Most of my photography nowadays is in a studio environment. So I use my computer and my camera to gather and I utilize automatic. But if I'm out in the field and I don't have my laptop with me. And I have to manually do my folder stacking. Then I set my camera in manual mode. I do not try to do it automatic. About web server. Should I use should I use menu? 26. Aperture, Selecting Your depth of Field for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So for the next three lessons, they are going to be very short. I'm not going to go into a deep dive. Any major explanations, keep it non-technical. First-line is amplitude. For your smallest subjects were talking subjects at all when EN's or smaller, I recommend you trying use an aperture of f 8 to 11 in it. Then above F 11, like F 22, you will start to get defraction artifacts allowing your color of your object. In order to keep from getting this, you will need to store it using bowties backing, which we all want to talk about. But if you don't want to use focus stacking, and I recommend you try not to use apertures of aloud F 16, F 22. Now what is the fraction that is rare that the whole, the opening in the lens is so small that when the light comes here, separates, it spreads and it causes deflection. So to prevent that, we don't want our opening to be so small. Now, as we talked about in photography, aperture, The opening, the more light that comes in, however, the less than focus. If you are trying to achieve that effect, then I would recommend using SAP and around between 2 a to F by 0.6. That will give you that nice sharp image with the background load, our, if we are photographing a subject that is bigger than one year, remember microbe is one to one. Your subjects would want to start being bigger than the sensor. You're going to not be able to see the entire object. In that case, ideal aperture settings would be between F2 point a to F P. And that will keep a lot of your subject in focus or my photography. 27. Shutter Speed, Controlling Camera Shake or Motion Blur in Macro Photography: Next, let's talk about shutter speed. In macro photography is very important that you keep your shutter speed relatively high. If you're using a tripod, you can set your shutter speed lower because the camera shape will not be as much of an issue and you can open your shutter for longer periods of time. However, if you are a hand holding your camera and trying to do your macro photography, I recommend you keep your shutter speeds faster into the 20th of a second, there is a wall in photography that your focal length in your shutter speed, your shutter speed should be traced your vocally up. So if your focal length is, in my case, this is a 90 millimeter lens, the focal length would be a 180. Now for micro photography, I like to triple that. So I'm going to go to 240 of hundreds of a second and actually trip away in medical photography. But the ratio, typically for photography is vocally of times to pull your shutter speed. And that keeps you from getting camera shake. Now, if you're gonna be using flash the floor, we're going to talk about in the next section, we're going to talk at all about light. I set my shutter speed to sync with my flesh speed. And that works very well. That is for the next section when we start talking about light. 28. ISO, Control The Noise of Macro Photography: In this section we're just going to talk about anions. Oh, now I typically don't mess it by yourself. I keep it as low as possible. Most of the time I get set it on octo, don't lower the ISO. The cleaner your image. However, the less light is able to penetrate the sensor. Good ISO for macro photography would be no higher than 400, maybe 800. Again, I like to keep it as low as possible. Well, 100 or 200. The higher your ISO, the more noise you introduce into your picture. Roi, so works great. If you're using Lightroom, there are some of the settings and flatters where you can denoise your picture. Same thing, dark table. You can denoise the picture. In Lightroom does an excellent job. The bigger your sensor, the more tolerant it is to live noise might be 750. I can run my ISO 6400 or higher, not have any noise. It is excellent BS. And for third, cameras are not as good as sensors or smaller. So I would recommend you keep your ISO under 1600 if you're using a bx class and serve or four-thirds. 29. Your Camera Setting for Macro Photography: Hi and welcome back. So this concludes the section on camera settings. And I didn't cover everything that it can do. A deep dive into all the different settings that you will find in your camera. As we proceed throughout the rest of the course, we're going to be getting more into hands-on. And when we're going to be doing projects together. And I'll be walking you do in explaining everything. As I go. I will show you or tell you, but my camera settings are exactly for these picture we'd take roadmap. Thank him was math.pi says, when I'm setting up the scenes, when I'm shooting the scenes, um, focus stacking everything. So there'll be more to come on camera settings. When I gave you in this section is just jumping in stone, a starting point to get you started. And we will alter and adjust accordingly as we do the hands-on projects. Next, let's talk about lighting. 30. Introduction Lighting of Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So in this section we're going to start talking about lighting, both natural and artificial. And I'm going to walk you through the techniques I use to light my subject. Now, lining in microbiota can be difficult. We are working with just a small aperture, trying to keep as much in focus as possible that roulette, very little lightning class photography is your best friend, michael photography. Now I'm going to show you how I use photography as well as some diffusing techniques. Because harsh, sharp light colleges unflattering shadows. So I'm going to show you some techniques for diffusing the light. 31. Basic Fundamentals Lighting in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So lighting is a key factor in photography. In fact, the name photography versus Greek literally means painting with light, without light, and we do not have photography. So we have to learn to combat how to manipulate, how to control our life. Whether we're using natural light or artificial light, that position of the light can play a big factor in our images as well. Some light sources we cannot control, like the sun. If we are doing outdoor microbes photography, the direction of the sun plays a big part on our light dean of our subject. We can't simply reach up in a reader, just the sun. So we have to be able to move around in buying the correct position that gives us the best lighting for our subjects. Sometimes out or be back live, sometimes out of beef, but lit or enlightening from the side. Using computers can't help combat the harshness of the bright sun and learned how to use them correctly is very beneficial. Also, being able to bounce light back into our subject. So using reflectors, again, very beneficial artificial light. Sometimes if we're shooting indoors and we're not able to get next to a window, we might have to use artificial light. Now whether we're using natural light and artificial light, like I mentioned before, we want to be able to diffuse it and let diffusion simply means is to soften that light. That is not a harsh, bright light causing very sharp shadows. So diffusion the light just gives it a more flattering, softer appearance. So in the following lessons on light, we're going to talk about natural light, and we're going to talk about artificial light in the techniques I use. So let's get started. 32. Using Diffusers and Reflectors in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. Now, before we get started talking about light, Thank you. It's important that we talked about diffusers, reflectors first. Now diffusers reflectors are fairly easy to pick up. You can get them from amazon or you can buy them at your local sharp. Here you see a set of diffusers, reflectors. They come in at the right one that is in the very front here is a diffuser. The light shines through it onto your subject in its softens to the light. It's not very harsh. The blackboard behind it would be like a blocker. Maybe you need a block out the sun or blackout a light source so that it doesn't interfere with your picture. And you only want the light coming from one angle, one set. So if you use this to block the light behind that, we have a gold reflector, which gives it a more warmer color, teal colored tone or on your subject. The silver gives a daily way more cooler color TNT on your survey and then a white. Here's a more neutral color cast onto your survey. So these are reflectors in diffusers to help soften the light or to reflect light back up into dark areas, it needs more light. And again, the black one, if you need to block light. Now at some times, you may not have access to a pre boss set of reflectors or diffusers. No problem. They are so easy to make at home just about any day, can work as a reflector or as a diffuser. To give me an example, here, I guess I have a piece of white board. And here's white board can reflect the light back up into my subject. Me give you an example. I'm going to close all my lights off. And I'm going to use a LED light, just one light to light me. Give me one minute via turned everything off. Okay. I am back. And as you can tell, just by having this one light, this is not a very flattering look, is it? Let's turn the lights back on so I can talk a little bit more with you about diffusers and reflectors. Okay. I'm back and I've got my life back to normal. Now. Arma of photographer for still photography, not a videographer. So sometimes my lighting is not great for videos, not the field I work in. So we'll talk about diffusers. Now. I told you that you could use something like a piece of paper. Something I'd really like to use is tracing paper. Tracing paper, because the tracing paper, you can layer it up. So here's one she upon layer it up. I can make it a little bit better by layer. Again, just now unlike four layers, a whole lot better. I like using tracing paper for diffusers, black paper I can use to block light, post the boys. I even made homemade diffusers. This is a Pringle camps. But I did is I cut it at an angle and in retail it back together so it kind of curves down. A Pringle. Can I keep the lids in this just builds up over my camera and it works like a SN2. So now I can angle my light down and diffuse it, so it's not as harsh. They're easy to make. Here is another can. Very delicious. I enjoyed these, but this would make a good reflective. Always keep the weird. Because I cut my tracing paper to fit the diameter of this lid. And you can use gels. You can get clear plastic and you can cut it up and make your own call ME gels. Put it on here, Snapchatting to place. You now have a diffuser. Now what would I do with this? Well, I could take my camera and I put out the backside so that the camera fits up in there. I can cut out the bottom. So they are again, my camera bits up into it. And because these for silver on the inside, especially like the smaller political cans, the light will bounce around inside. Income out. Few oily views kept. In soften your life. Very easy DIY ways to make homemade diffuser and reflectors diffusing the light, again is very important because it cuts down on harsh shadows. We're back in the light. Again. If you only have one light source and you don't have to have a flash head, simple flashlight and LED flashes night or do grape didn't put it on one side and put into some kind of reflector on the other side. And there you go. Do you have turned one light source in the two? So we're gonna get further into light nets. We're going to start out talking about natural light. Maybe we will talk about artificial light. 33. Natural Light for Macro Photography: Hi and welcome back. So in this lesson we're going to talk about natural light. Non-natural light is what photographers refer to as the sun, as opposed to artificial light versus made to technology, light bulbs, LED flash units. In our big advocate of using flashed in my global target B. And I will be explaining that in future lessons. Now, even though we refer to natural light usually as being the sun, it can look very different depending on different factors. For example, the time of day, morning, or in the evening. It sounds completely different DNA at noon when it is over here, the weather. Is it cloudy, overcast. Clouds actually make an excellent diffuser in solvents delight. Oftentimes I hear amateur photographers complaining or Cloud and bird. Personal perchloric variety. There's a cloudy day diffusing the light, making IT staff cuts down on harsh shadows. So we enjoy when it is cloudy, whereas other photographers get down and depressed because they think they don't have the bright sunlight. Bright sunlight is Diane. Most professional photographers do not like bright sunlight. It creates unflattering or pet. We love it when it's cloudy. The season. The seasons can also change the outlook of how or where a picture might look. Winter looks totally different in summer. So these are all just some factors that can affect the way natural light will work on our pictures. I took a couple of pictures of a leaf. Here's a simple leaf and it has some water droplets on it from the morning. Do these pictures was taken at seven AM in the morning and the sun was to my back. It was low in the sky. So let's look at those. So here you can see this was the first picture. I took. Messages, a base pictures. Just show you what I'm talking about. As you can see, these are the water droplets and the leaf. Now the sun was to my back. And this is a harsh sun shining straight down onto my subject. In post-processing, that same picture, I just cropped it down into a square by like using a one-by-one square on my Mac global cartography. That's just my personal style. Every photographer or develop your own style of photography. When I'm doing microbe, I like to do squares. I also like to black and out my backgrounds or nice setup my camera settings and my shot so that I can get a dark background because I like working with dark background and goodbye foreground, objects and colors. So again, this is the same picture of this club dan. So here I zoom. Vn is a little bit closer, getting more into the micro to the actual true micro by Godot, closer to my subject. And I focused on is water droplet right here in the flood. So this is still with discerned to my back. So the water droplets are fluent lived. Here. I moved over to the side. So now I'm standing on the side and now my subject, this water droplet is being inside. They're being lit them aside. And I was able to capture the edge of the leaf that this water droplet is sitting on. Now this picture is not truly in focus as much as I would like to. I'm trying to handhold I'm not using a tripod. I'm not using a flash. All these pictures are handheld. I'm using a Mac Booleans, a memory or magnifying, but they make word Leon's. It is very hard to stay steady when your hand holding a camera, I tip my hat to photographers who can do it. There are some photographers who can handhold that camera. They can hand hold an aching do it at a magnification of 51 or even 12 to 1. They're vague. Zoom in here like a microscope and their hand holding the camera in there, we're able to do it. I tip my hat to them. Good job. For me. I find it very difficult. I'm not as steady. I'm not as young as I used to be. My eyes are not as good as it used to be. Two. Hand-holding is not easy for me as it might be for a lot of you. Some of you may be able to some of you may be like me and are not able to hand hold. As good as we would like to. I recommend you use a tripod. If you can use a tripod, use it, stabilized that camera, then you can get them tack sharp, focusing. When we get into artificial light, a really good hands-on projects. Those would be done in my own studio. In every day. It'll be up on a tripod, nice and steady law, Dan. And you'll see a big difference in the focus versus this one versus natural light outdoors, just trying to and hold the camera. Here's another water droplet, kinda the same picture as before, just from a little bit different angle, you can see a little bit more light. Come on down on the bottom. Now one technique that you can use, if you are having problems and holding your camera, don't try to take single pictures. Hours doing single pictures two hours. Just put in my camera up there and I was just focusing in and I recommend manual focus when you are trying to handhold, you can do automatic. But when you're zooming in that close and that small slightest bit of movement and you're going to lose that book is anyways, don't start out automatic. Let it get logged in and it gets a lot dan, then this slightly walk your body until it's crystal clear. An intake to sharp. Moving your body. Don't try and move boldly the ceiling. Move your body when it's crystal clear, take the shot. Another thing that you can do is set your camera if it has continuously high on down like mine does, mine has continuously high. That's the C8. Put it on continuously high. But a root you to do is to take speed shots. So I can hear that. So that is what a lot of photographers will do, especially when they're trying to handhold app make. Well, back in the day when I first got into photography, you couldn't do that. You couldn't do that? Because we used Phil, I guess told you how old I am. I'm back in the film days. And in the film days, the maximum you can give us 36 exposure. Usually it was like 24, 7 times 12. You didn't have ISO that you've just changed on the fly. If you wanted to change the ISO, you had to take the entire war film out to the new law 30 me and because the film on the canister which say what the IRS already was, 100, ISO 400, and so forth. You only had 12, 24, maybe 36 exposures. So you had to be more precise. You had a pick, your shots. Couldn't GS sit in rapid fire. Now, because of us, older photographers like myself, we have a slogan, We have a say in what we call this. That's called spray and pray. Instead had again spray and pray. And what you're doing is you're spraying your rapid firing bird shots. You're playing that you can get one or two good pictures out of that. And that's perfectly fine with today's technology in today's cameras, you can do that because you're not having to worry about, I guess, birth through 24 shots. Now I have to reload my camera again so you can spray and play in. That is a good technique for today's photographers. So when you're trying to do Michel photography, don't be afraid to burst shoe that way. You know that at least one of them hopefully would narrow your focus perfectly. So that is natural light. In techniques that I use. If I'm having a handhold and I'm out in the sun. Now I could use a diffuser, but I didn't have a diffuser with me, our habits, just me and my camera. So I didn't have any diffusers. And I do Birch shot recite could've. I did all my pictures because I'm old school photography. Store it back in the day of actual beyond where you didn't do burst, you selectively focusing, pick your shots. And that's what I did on all of these today. Try burst shooting. Try it. It might help you in your photography especially or in your focused Jackie, if you're trying to handhold and focus DAG and your client, okay, click and click, click. And you're trying to get all the little points to that. You can merge them all together into one. That's going to be very hard. Burst, take 30, 45, bird shot, the knee. And when you get into light room or into Photoshop, yeah. You may have a 100 pictures. Mean you only need 15 or 20 good ones out of that, a 100 tumors into a good image. We'll talk more about this when we actually getting to the section on focus stacking. So next up will be artificial light, flash photography and using LED is going to be our subject for the artificial line segments. So we're going to be back in the studio. And when we taken a few pictures of the nice, lovely flowers, when we talk about artificial life. After that is our hands-on. And we actually start doing our projects. 34. Artificial Light for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So now we're going to start talking about artificial light. Now before our story shown you artificial light, let me show you the setup I'm going to be using. As you can see, I have my camera with my math booleans. So at, upon my tripod in the flowers that I told you we were going to be using for this demonstration. Now instead of having you just sit here and look at me taking pictures of this, I will cut back to the pictures and show you them as we do them in explained what is going on in each picture. Okay. Now let's look at those pictures. I took ten pictures. One set of pictures I took with LED lights, lights in my subject. Another set I took with my flash here and my Smoot, me and I took pictures with the light box. There is the first picture now this is just normal room light, no extra light shining on my subject. This is ISO 100 f star 4 0 at 1 25th of a second. Because of wide open aperture of f 4 Mani, this center piece right here where my office is in focus and everything else is out of focus. And that is the problem you're gonna run into with micro photography. Next, I turned on my LED light. Emitted is with the LED light again, ISO 100 f-stop of 4, shutter speed 1 sixth of a second. Steel only thing in focus is right here in the center. More light common argue the Soviet GCC. I don't really like it though. To me, it's not a flattering picture is kind of they're not very good. I decided to my f-stop up to f 0.8, just normal room light so that there's point a just normal room light. I'm at 0.5 of a second. Shutter speed a little bit more is in focus? Yes. Okay. But I still don't like it. So let's turn on the LED light. Led lights turned on. Now, really a big effect on they're not really working time to go to the flash in, just stop trying to use the LED light. Now you can use LED lights or any kind of light that they emit. Microbic Tartuffe is patients. You're not going to narrow your picture. As soon as you set it up and take the picture, you're going to have to play around with it moved or lights or rail. Triumphant. A bad time from the file type. Hello, hi, time from down low until you find something that works. This is not a lesson on actually taking the pictures. This is a lesson or in your six Blaine in artificial light in C and some of the effects that you can give. So I got out my flash head and US turned the power to 116 per second. And my snoop, my whole meets new. And I start that on my camera. And I decided to see what kind of pictures I could get using this as my lighting source. First picture. Now, turn to flash on yet. So here's this picture. The flash snow turned on yet I'm still at ISO 108 and I set my shutter speed to 160th of a second. I like this picture. It's kind of dark, kind of moody, but I like it. So then I turned on the flash. Remember the flourishes with my SN2. So I'm concentrate my light into a certain point, not spreading it out everywhere. Again, I'm, I'm one 16th power on my flash here. And I got this picture and it was too overpowering, even at 1 16th power, it was put in too much light out onto my subject. So I decided I would ask now and really dilute and gone after. Let's try doesn't like barks. So on this next picture, I got out my light box. It on my light bulbs. Yes. Light. So it reflects light very good on the inside. The two openings on each side as tracing paper that I used for deep user to, I started my flower bouquet in to that and I turned on the LED lights. In. This is the picture that I got ripped. The LED lights turned on, not very flattering. Really wasn't too happy with it. My light bulbs words in quiet, putting out enough light. Wanted. Not for this subject. Like marches work gray and more power for your lights are shining through. The better it will light up the inside of the light bulbs. So I decided to try something else. Let's see if I can shine my SNOMED into the light parts and use it to light up my subject. So that's what I did next. In this picture. I use the newt. I turned off the LED lights and I just used a minute. So no LED lights this time, I'm at ISO 108 for my aperture. And 160th of a second MATLAB to steal said at a 16th power, this picture is a little bit better because I'm inside of my lightbox, even though my lights are turned off, I'm blocking a lot of the excess exterior of light, maybe coming in through the window. So it's a little bit different texture using the flash inside of a light box. There are still two more pictures that I took. So my next picture, I decided to make a few more adjustments. First day, no idea. I went to ISO 100 like I've been doing, but I change my f-stop to f 16. Now I've got a very tiny opening. And I change my shutter speed at 250th of a second. So I got a faster shutter speed. But flash is still on the camera with just new at a 16th power. But the picture is a lot darker. Remember the opening is smaller, so less latest company and I also sped up the shutter speed. Shutter staying open less. So it cut down cloud a bit of the light coming in. And with my flash and SN2 only set at a 16 for power. This is what I got. One more adjustment. Let's turn the power on my flash up to an eighth of a second. Just turn it up one star up to an eighth of a stack. And I got this, this picture, steel f 16, 12 50th of a second on the shutter speed, ISO 100. So as you can see, different options of using artificial light. Now these are now applying pictures. This is just a quick demonstration to illustrate a different techniques for using different artificial light, from LEDs to light boxes to desktop lamps. If you run it, you use desktop lamps for your lightbox is instead of the LED lights using a flash, using a flash inside of a light box. Hopefully you can get a little bit of a feel on how artificial light works inside of a studio environment. Next section, we're going to actually get into the fun stuff. The hands-on stuff in R will be explained a little bit more detail step by step. The process that I'm going to see you in the next section. 35. Your Lighting Set Up and Gear for Macro Photography: And I wrote them back. So this concludes this section on lifetime. Now one thing that I realized I forgot to do, I forgot to show you my LED lights. Now, I guess have a cheap set of LED lights. And you can see him right here as a clamp, tighten clamp it and I can move it around to where I needed. It adds a diffuser on it. I can park, don't diffuse off. And here the LEDs, you can see there's a whole series of them. And you see that the LEDs, sometimes I use it without the diffuser, sometimes I use it with pretty blade. There's the diffuser. Any eclipse would be wherever I need it to clip to when I'm using it with my light, but they take after diffuser, so that is brighter to shine. Do the tracing paper. I have two other, so those are my LED lights. Now, these are the ones that I could find here in Thailand. You might find different styles. You can also use desk lamps. So the call to action, I want you to find what you can use for light source. Is it a lamp? Do you have do you have a flashlight? Do you have a flash here? Can you make a light box or pick one up? Pretty cheap on Amazon? They're very easy to make, are made mine. And I want you to find out what do you have that you can use for reflectors or for diffusers? I use tracing paper, wax paper like for baking works great. A piece of cloth or a shirt, a white shirt, a light sheet. Your possibility for diffusers or wide open, just about any vein that is transparent can work for a diffuser. There you go. There's your call to action checklist. Find out what you can use, what you have if you don't have anything, find out where it would Cass could pick up the things that you do need. I recommend you find stuff around the house, but if you want to buy it, and that's your prerogative, I'm just here to give you my advice on what I do. See you in the next section where we actually start our hands on activities. 36. Introduction Setting Up a Macro Photography Scene: Hi and welcome back. I'm so excited. We've made it to the halfway point in our course. The first five sections. I know we're a little bit boring. We was talking about the fundamentals of camera gear in lenses and software in lighting. But now we've made it to the halfway point. And from here on out, we are going to be doing hands-on projects. And we're going to be diving into actual Michel photography. We're going to be setting up, as in this section, setting up our scene. But do I need, how do I calculate my minimum focus? Because that's important. It's important to know how to calculate what your minimum focuses. Not be confused with your minimum working distance. The minimum focus distance is based on where the sensor is in your camera. To your subject, I'm going to show you how to calculate the minimum focus distances versus your minimum working distance. We're going to be talking about backdrops. Now, back gobs are very important even though they're not heavily scene. Because most of the time when you're doing macro photography, blur out the background. So just about anything can work from the public to come to a book, to something that you print it out. Or third line, it could be a groans diagram, it could be any data. We're going to talk about that. In the end. We're going to actually do a call to action while want you to start thinking about, okay, what did your first project going to be like? Are you going to buy globe? Photograph? 37. Basic Fundamentals Setting Up a Macro Photography Scene: Hi, welcome back. So medical photography can be very challenging. And this is the reason why most of you are here. You're going to learn tricks and techniques and see examples of how other photographers are doing Michel photography. Maybe you've seen the pictures and you're like, Wow, how did he do that or have tried that? And it fails, it doesn't work. How is he able to make it work? That all comes down to the basic fundamentals of setting up your scene. This is what this whole section is about. August going to talk about. And I'm going to show you how you set up your scene. Now I've already talked to you about camera gear, camera lenses, software, and so forth. One of the important things about setup you're seeing is picking out what gear you're going to need. Because some gear you will need for some projects that you will not need for other projects, you're going to have to decide what kind of light or you're going to want to use, or you've gone to want to use natural light or artificial light. I personally like to use flash. You're going to need to know and calculate your focus distance so that you'll know how far away from your subject you have to be, or how close can you get to your subject? Magnification? How much are we going to magnify or picture? Do you know how to calculate that? I do. In fact, there's a website that I'm going to show you that or do the math for you. All you have to do is just key in the numbers. Get, calculate, and it'll tell you exactly what the magnification is going to be, where you're working distance, your focal length is going to be, it'll give you every day. We're going to talk about backdrops. What kind of backdrop should you use? Words? Should I position my backdrops? How far away should they be? Do I even need a backdrop? May not even need one. With Michel photography depending on your camera city didn't get a black background even in the brightness of the Sun. So background and how to set it up or you're seeing. And we're going to learn how to compose our decompose. Should I be on a level plane of sight? Should have a student from an angle. Believe it or not, that also had a very important factor in your scene setup. If you're trying to get the maximum in focus. Even out a wide open aperture like to point a, the flatter your pen name is with your camera does keeping your camera level. We have your scene. The more vertical to seniors in the morgue level your cameras, the more that a, b and focus. If you're shooting at an angle, it would not be as focused with not be as focused. And you will have a much shallower depth of field without further ado, what might I want to use? 38. Laying Out Everything We Need for Macro Photography: Hey, welcome back. So you really need to have some fun because Pythium, and now we get stored our hands on projects. But first, we've gotta make sure we got all of our gear, everything that we're going to need. So let's talk about that for a minute. Hopefully you have your camera. Very important, but can't do pictures about a camera. Anyways, ty Lee go with an effect of both frame. What did you decide to go with a crop dx, or maybe even a micro four-thirds isn't mirrorless. Or is it a digital SLR? Doesn't really matter. They will all get the job done. Some have more benefits than others. A fx has a higher resolution because the sensors are bigger. But using a dx or a crop sensor, or a micro four-thirds has built in crop factor with pretty much magnifies the picture to a greater degree. Have with just a straight up FX mirrorless. You don't have to worry as much about camera vibration in camera shake as you do when you have a digital SLR because I'm a disgrace who are in the mirror has to come up. You take the picture. So good points, bad points. It all depends on your preference and more all the job done. So moving on from our camera body. Now we're going to talk about lenses. The ED santiago with a dedicated my Booleans. Or are you going to be using a setup extension? Or maybe a focus, closer focus filter? Maybe you're not going to use either one of those. And you're just going to use a reverse rain and mount your lens on backwards. Again, all these are good options if this dependence or your preference and what you have available to you. Now, let's look at a couple other data you might want to consider. Here we have a micro shooting table. This is kind of small and it actually curves. So enables you to have a nice smooth transition and to working surface, to foreground without any harsh lines. Very convenient, bad necessity if you have one great. I personally don't use one, but it is an option. Something else I would recommend would be a light box. If you have a light box, again, I use wind, but not all the time. And they're easy to make. If you don't want to go out and buy one, just take a normal box, cut windows into each side of it, taped some tracing paper or something that is translucent. Enamel DPU is your life very simple, very easy. Another thing that I talked to you about early on and we will get more into when we get into focus stacking is, are you going to be used in a focusing rail or you're going to be using software. I personally use software. I like it better. But if you have a focusing well, that works great too. Just remember we'll be focusing real. You have to manually move it. Eats step to attain all your images that you are going to later merged in your software. We're focusing software like Iliad card remote, or dizzy count. Software does all the calculations for you. Now you gotta do is he had started Reddit, take a series of pictures totally up to you. If you want to manually do it using a focusing well, go for it. They were perfectly fine. If you want to let the software do our thinking and do it for you, go for it. They work. Absolutely. I actually use software. I don't use a focusing well. Okay, so that's just a couple items, but what else might be one or consider or do you have your tripod or are you planning on trying to handhold to do your pictures? I like using a tripod. Try and a hand. Oh, when you are magnifying the degree that we are going to be using such close proximity to our subject. I prefer to use a tripod. Makes it a lot easier. What kind of lights are you going to be using? Did you decide to go with a flash head or you're going to use in a desktop lamb, maybe a flashlight. Maybe you're just going to use a flashlight. Or you can reuse an LED light. Soft boxes. So K10 and account what kind of lights you're going to be using. This brings us to diffusers and reflectors. Are you going to be deep using your life and make it soft or weave it back into your subject. These are all things that you're going to want to take into account because light is probably the most critical part of my chromatography. We'll work on if such small apertures that very little light is penetrating into our sensor as it is. So we have to introduce light as much as possible. The last natural light from the sun or artificial light. Another island and you might want to consider using is, what kind of backdrops are you thinking about? The backdrops behind our subject are also very important because they are sometimes seen, usually blurred out, but they are still seen. Now. If you're doing water bubble reflection photography, your backdrop is actually reflected into your water bubble. You'll see it nice and in focus to consider what backdrops so you're going to want to use, are they going to be Bruns? Just a normal everyday picture that could be anything like a BAA copy curve. They could be in vain because we're dealing with searched my new small microbe pictures that it'll load up to more than life-size and blurred out in most cases. Another thing you want to consider, how are you going to hold your subject? Some of our subjects are going to be very tiny. I personally like to use their hands, alligator clips. And this is not seen to, this is off-camera. My subject is always going to be seen and I like to use a make my backdrops, my backgrounds black a lot of times so that the black alligator clips, it made it so that they don't show up as much, if at all. Depend on how you compose, empower, you, climb into your subject, in your setting it up. They may not be seen at all. Another day. If you're going to be doing water droplet or water refraction, you might want to pick up some good Iceland. It's easily picked up your local pharmacy. You can give food graded stores like Walmart. So you might want to pick up some glycerin that you're gonna be using the listener and I recommend you dilute it. My dilution is 50 50, 50 percent listen and 50 percent water. Now, how are you going to apply this for? I use just a simple spray bottle. I use a simple spray bottle and I just give it a few squirts. It, it'll give you missed it on there and it will build it up. And you'll see that. You'll see that when we get into the actual projects, sometimes I use an eye dropper, just an eyedropper to block or draw on there. And again, I'm just using glistening this I've got my local pharmacy, just some glistening and it gets made the water. So that is a little bit more stable and will last longer and give you time to work. Also, I recommend if you can picking up a set of syringes. Blunt tip is okay, or they can have the sharp point, it doesn't matter. This is very helpful for placing your water drops place. Now on to your survey, we will go into techniques on how to do that. You don't want to put a big old blob. That's not going to work. You're going to want to step it up little by little and I will show you how to do that. So for water or glistening solution then you don't have to English US trader water, it doesn't have to be built. You can be tapped water out of the sink. That's perfectly fine too. Okay. So I know I didn't cover every day and there was a lot and I, Meir's, there's a lot to macro photography, as you can tell by this course. This course is already pretty low and we're already past the two-hour mark just talking about basic fundamentals of macro photography. We haven't even started our projects here. So I'm not gonna go into detail on every single little thing that you're going to need for micro photography. I've just basically talked about somebody items that I recommend and we can expand or takeaway from there. So in our next lesson, let's calculate, let's figure out where our magnification and our minimum working distance and focal distance is C. You an atlas. 39. Minimum Focus and Working Distance Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So now let's learn how to capitally word our banking application. And, or, OR focal distance is because it's going to be very important when you are trying to set up your scene. You have to know how close or how far away you have to be to your subject in what the new magnification is going to be to get us going to change on your lens. So the first thing I wanna do is just look at the icon, 50 millimeter lens. As you remember when I talked about lenses earlier in the course, I showed you how to look up your lenses now hopefully everybody has done that. And you know, the specs for whatever liens You're going to be used in, whether it's a Mac Booleans or December regularly. And here we can see that this is the 50 millimeter. F. 1.8 is my maximum aperture. You have 16 as my minimum aperture. My minimum poker distance is 0.45 meters. The next number we want to learn, maximum reproduction ratio, that's your magnification period. Say it is 0.15 BEPS. Let's look at the Nikon, 35 millimeter. So here we have the nighttime 85 millimeter. Just like before. Let's go down to the bottom. So my vocal Liam is 85 millimeter mm. Maximum aperture, f 1 a, my minimum aperture, they have 16. Pay. Minimum distance 0.8 meters. And my maximum reproduction ratio, point 1, 2 for Business say 0.12. So these are important numbers. So for this demonstration, we're just going to focus on the 50 millimeter, just for this demonstration. So I know I want to be using my 50 millimeter, for instance, may be different for you. Again, for this demonstration, we're going to talk about the 50 millimeter. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to go to another website that's going to explain in detail, how do we calculate this? It has a counter for a letter for you to use. That website is Cambridge in color. It's a learning community for photographers. That's me go to that site now. Cameras in color, a learning community for photographers. And this is the section on micro extensive tubes, enclosed SAP lenses. Very important because some of you will be using close-up lenses. Some of you will be using extensively tubes. This site does not go into detail about reverse rings. This is just for the most common ways most photographers do macro photography, usually as if distancing two or a cheap closer glands. So what I wanna do for us, I want to scroll down to this section right here, the CDS section right here, I guess highlighted in blue. And assessing tube increases lens magnification by an amount equal to the extension distance divided by the lenses focal length. For example, adding a 25 millimeter extensive 2 to a 50 millimeter lens, but gives you a magnification gain of 0.5 x. Therefore, they have Dylan's original massification was 0.15. Remember I showed you that earlier. This look at that again. 0.15, correct? Then the new modification will be 0.15 plus 0.5 eggs resist the extensive 2, which equals 0.65 deaths. So the closest spoken just cosine distance will also decrease to 210 millimeters. So let's scroll down here to the bottom here is the calculator. So for the narrative magnification, I will put in the point 15. My Lean's is a 50 millimeter. The extensive tube. If I added a 25 millimeters tensing tube and I hit calculate, it tells me that the new magnification is 0.65 ads in my new closest focusing distance is 209 millimeters. Now this changes depending on how much assessing tubes you inter caution. You can never extend with assessing tubes greater than focal length of the Leon's. So my lens is 50 millimeters means the maximum expressing tubes I can add with B. D. Now most extensive tubes come in 1220 and 36. They come in a kit of three. So I could add 36. So there's PM 36. Let's say I'm using that one by hit recalculate. Now my new magnification has jumped to 0.87. My focal distance has changed to a 101 millimeters. Now if I add 36 and the 12 together and stack it, that will give me a 4848 millimeter extension. Das is as close as I can get to pick the without going over. My new calculation gives me a one. Just like a micro Lean's 1.1 repaid focus distance of 200 millimeters. So I'm at a foe magnification. Remember, a true micro is a one to one. We are at a one-to-one now, by adding 48 millimeters of assessing tubes to a 50 millimeter layer. We have achieved them. Now, can I do this on my Mac Orleans? Sure him, I can do this on a macro lens. My micro Lean's is a one, not appoint 15 beside one. There's a one S. It is a 90 millimeter. And because 90 millimeters is greater than 48, I can do the extent I didn't do all three, a much distinct tubes to 12 to 20 and a 36 given me a total of 68. That now moves my magnification on my dedicated Michael Booleans to 1.76. In my new closest focus distance is 389 millimeters. So yes, you can put Testing tubes on a micro lens. They were just buying a lot of photographers do it in. It gives us greater magnification. Will almost getting to the point of 2 times magnification. Okay, so let's go back to 0.15. And let's go back to our 50 millimeter song is gone back to standard. Standard dimensions. Work was in when we first started, and that was this right here. Now, I want to drop down, does another one down here. You can read further if you are a non pros and cons. But let's talk about close up lenses. Just say you're going to use a closer Booleans. A close-up filter is usually specified in terms of diopter. This is a measure of their magnifying power. High numbers yield more relative manner vacation on a given lands, but image quality acyl chains to decrease correspondingly, typically values range from a plus two to a plus bi. A lot of kids that you can buy. What how about plus one or plus two? Plus four plus and a plus tn. So on native magnification member for 15 millimeter is a point 1, 5, right? That was the native. It is a 50 millimeter. And let's say we're going to use a close-up filter. We're going to use just the one. Let me hit calculate. My new magnification has gone from 0.152.21 and my effective focal length is now 47.6 millimeters. Let's go let's go big let's use the biggest closer. Go to rehab. I'm now at a magnification of 0.73 and my effective focal length is 33.3 millimeters. So the main number that we're looking at here is what's my new magnification? My new magnification is a 0.73. Using Doppler. Are they as good as the micro extensive tubes now? But they get the job done. So here you can see a general guide on how to calculate work. Changes will be taken a bag that's the right thing on the bottom will create Lean's focal length of 50 millimeter. Native is 0.15 X. We have an extensive too, but with 12 millimeter, it'll be a magnification of 0.39 over 25, over your main rotation of 0.65. The maximum you'd be able to go would be 50. In a typical kid is actually 48 millimeters. Other extension, meaning look out at a 100 millimeter, 200 millimeter using closer lenses. That same 50 millimeter, we'll now be a 0.25 if you used up 4.45 and so forth. So I'm hoping that gives you a little bit of understanding on how to calculate what your new magnification will be and what your new focal distance will be. Your minimum focal distance. Again, you can do it in the same vein, but they've mapped Booleans or just a regular standard Kentlands. It's totally up to you. It depends on what you have. But now that we know what our magnification is going to be and what our new focal distance is. Now we can better setup or seen in get the right distance from your subject to the sensor on the camera or not, then I might want to remind you, the focal distance is not from the phone under lands to your subject, is for the sensor to your subject. Risk brings us to why you can never go greater the end, the focal length of the lens. The lens is 50 millimeter. You can not go higher than 50 millimeter on your sensing to. Otherwise you're going to be focusing inside of the layers versus physically impossible. You'd have to have your subject inside your lens review. Keep that in mind. The average in Berlin, the focal length of your lens. Okay, I will see you in the next lesson. 40. Back Drops Used in Macro Photography: Hi and welcome back. So now let's start talking about backgrounds. Because it's very important that is, in your background is something that is pleasing. Now, even though we are going to most likely burned out, as not always the case. Sometimes we don't want the background bowed out, wanted to show depending on what type of picture was taken. If we're doing water, we fraction where we went to image to appear into R1 through bubble. The end, you're going to learn a good Emirates. Now, remember when you're doing luxury fashion photography, that whatever your images, whatever your object and you want to be refactored into your water bubble has to be upside down. Just like looking in a mirror. The image will be reversed. So it will show up upside down. If you have it positioned right-side-up from an historic. Keep that in mind when doing a lot to mobile reflection in your getting to more on that when we actually do that section. But let's talk about backdrops now there are three different types of bag blobs that I typically use. One-on-one or the first one is natural. It is an actual physical item. It may be a coffee cup, maybe your book, it may be other flowers, cytoplasm out hand-holding and I'm out walking around with my camera and I see something and I want to take a macro picture of it or whatever is behind it is considered the back. If I'm in my studio, are made position something there on purpose, like a bouquet of flowers. Anything can work in my chromatography as a background. Even if VS, most ugliest thing you've ever seen, maybe it's just got some good colors that you like. When it's all blurred out, you cannot make out what it is anyways. So it gives a splash of color behind your background. So that is just natural, beautiful items. The second type of background would be something that you could put it out. I can emulate it. So you may want to put a picture behind your salary. In macro photography, your audience are not going to know it isn't image in bag. A lot of Michel photography pictures and you see online the bag mounds or fake. They are not a real background. Photographers stuck a background card behind is subject. It looks and gives the illusion of being real, but it's just a background card. Back down. Cars are easy to make. In fact, let me show you a website where you can get free images. 173, don't have to worry about copyright laws. These are all freely distributed by other content creators like ourselves. I am a member of this website. I submit photos to them as well as download photos from now, it is 1% per year period right here in the center. It saves the Internet source of freely usable images and they are in high resolution. So for our demonstration purposes, we're going to look for backgrounds or obese suitable for micro photography. Know, there's all kinds of pictures and I said, all these are free to use. If you see something you want to use, you can get like, ooh, this is very nice. You can just hit Download button right here in the corner. In the corner of the picture, you get hit the Download button. Now like the northern lights, it'll tell you information a little bit about the photographer who took the picture. If you hover over their name, you can see other pictures by EM. You can even hiring him if you wanted to. But if you go up to the little plus sign up in the top right corner and click on that. You can create and make a collection, my collection. So maybe you want to start collecting some of the pictures nominal click backup for that. Let's go back to the top. So here I'm going to Kn might blow him a C or a o. Micro backdrops, BAC or OPS backdrops. In here, my intro button. And here you can see some microbe like blobs. Now somebody is, I don't know. That's not quite right. I'm looking for I want color, almost certainly some good color to it. So I'll go back to a period of time, but I will just click on color. Ah, here's some color pictures who are like this one. I really like this one, this one right here in the center. Now again, I can just click the little drop down arrow or say download photo. I could go up to the top where it says Add collection. Here's another thing you can do on any of these. If you just click right in the center, is providing to the center of it an inkling click on that. You can get a big image. From here. You can also download. You can specify what size if you go right beside where it says download. In, hit the drop-down arrow. You can download small, medium, large, or the original size. Okay. You can see how many views this picture has been used 19 million times. A lot has been downloaded 184 thousand times. You can see when it was published, when it was uploaded. Little communists that photographer made when they took the picture. Now again, these are all free picture download. You don't have to pay for them. They are free to use and you can contribute your own pictures to the needs. That excellent source for getting pictures to use in your macro photography. Or any, any project you're doing, like just micro, any project where you might need any image. You can get them from here. Now, the third option for backdrops or indexical, physical backdrops. Now, anything can work as a digital backdrop. Your phone. Using your phone, you can bring the m reserve, set it up behind your subject, and use your phone. I use an external second monitor when I went, digital backdrops. So my abs 10 second monitor, I'll set it up and put myself in front of it. In. That's my backdrop. You can use a TB flat-screen TV. You can use your laptop or your regular computer. You can use a tablet. You can even use a physical picture frame was so easy to pick up in English, upload your pictures into it. Now keep in mind the angle. When you're using a physical backdrop. Make sure you just did engage in perfectly so that there is no external reflections. Now, what's the benefit of using a digital backdrop? Well, there are several. Let's talk lighting for a minute. Renew our lighting a bag glove, whether it's a physical, natural backdrop, an image, a disk rollback, glom. You always want a light, your bags drop separate from your subject. Never want to use the same light to light bulb. So you should have two light sources. One light source for your backdrop and one light source for your subject. Now, the benefit of using a digital backdrop, you do that need a second light source. It has its own light source. When you turn on the device in display the image, turn your brightness all the way up. Alternative brightness down dependent on how dark or how bright you want low background image to be in. It had its own built-in light source. So you don't need a second light. Now, are you have to worry about is light in your subject. So does go back blobs or very convenient and take it from a professional photographer. Professional photographer, huge digital backdrops. Not let them tell you they don't, they are lying to you. Professional photographers use digital backdrops. They are convenient, they are easy. And you can change the backdrop on an instrument, just a click of a mouse. So that is my little beard on backgrounds. In our next lesson, we're going to set up a scene. We're going to actually set up seeing and are probably not probably, I'm going to use a disk rollback graph just to illustrate the point on what I was talking about. So we will use it just to go back up and we're going to set up a scene in our next lesson. See you there. 41. Setting Up The Macro Photography Scene: Hey, welcome back. So now let's set up a scene. And I've got my camera on a tripod. I've got a table set up, Afghan, an external monitor setup that I'm going to use for the back. And I've got my third hand setup that are actually have only an extra light. Use the third hands to hold my subject today. Pamela do some panther, don't put this demonstration. I'm also going to be huge in one of my LED lights is put a little extra light into my subject. Now I don't have to write up the background because I'm using a on a monitor. So it had this on a light source. So let me show you the setup. And you can see here is the external lights. You can see the monitor. You can see my phone. Where's my phone doing there? I'm using my flow or a collective surface. Now I could use larger or I could use a piece of black Plexiglas. But in this case I'm using my phone and it gives me a nice, we've plugged this surface, just said must certainly God, in, see my camera here. My cameras set up with my mike Booleans. I have another light setup on my third hands that's going to be shining light down onto my search here. And of course, the monitor using it as a background. Okay, so I'm asked when we're using DC key out so that you can see what our SEA and LEA, using DC CAM software. If you take your picture. Let's get started. Taken a couple of picture. Okay, so here you can see this is found India, my lights turned on. Now I've got my subject in the frame. The marble. You can see the little stone behind it. And you can see the bluish tint coming out of the monitor given me a nice blue background, no time to backgrounds all burned out. Now if you'd look, my amateur set it at 0.6. I've got the white balance set to auto exposure compensation. Don't have anything adjusted, Anya. Oh, this symbol. Now I'm going to add to this first picture. And I have a picture. Now this is a starting point. Let me turn off some lights because this is not very good of a picture, is it? There's one of my LED light. Now let me turn on other life. Give it a little bit of an adjustment. There we go. That means I have to refocus again. There. Now, focus the end. My Marvel looks like IT. Department music, good cleaning. What do you think? Maybe by cleaned it up a little bit, it might be a little bit more shiny. So let me just do that. I guess when it under a little bit of water. Just a little bit of water just to take somebody a little bit shiny you XOR. But everything that a focus and there's not a very focused on that changed our chapter. That's going to add a little bit later if we can meet both disappear. Still a little bit better. But I can't get walk into focus. Now I'm at a or B. Now remember, the smaller the opening, the more you start down, the more that is in-focus. So let me see picture first and are using the remote to I'm not trusting the camera. I'm actually using my remote trigger in character a picture. This is the first picture that I took when I first set up I know of I is just the picture and we just go with lines. And with a change to a, Let's change this to, let's say 11 captured that picture. If 11 still didn't help much zone but focus did it? Didn't help alerts. Okay. Let's go bigger. Increase our aperture. To refocus again. Still on the bottom is an in-focus. So are you starting to see the limitations when you're explaining to do mycoplasma? We are now at 22 and I still I'm not able to get the law into his alongside of the vial and his character. That picture here is that picture f 22. So we'll add F 22 of steel ISO 103 seconds exposure value. So the shutter stays open for three seconds to get this picture in just a little bit better. In order for me to get everything into focus even more. I'm going to have to focus that. So if I wanted to come into focus as well as the Marvel both, then I'm going to have to focus stack now for this image. And I kind of like, kinda like devolve, kind of get out of focus. And the moral being in-focus. 42. Your Macro Photography Project: Hi, welcome back. So I hope now after this section you can see a little bit more about what goes into setting up a scene. Now please keep in mind, these lessons are very short. In an actual photography shoot. I may be working on a project for hours now, ten minutes. So keep that in mind, please. Damages may not be the greatest, but with time restraints, I cannot do my best work when trying to produce a course. Now, in a timely fashion areas, it's all an actual photography shoot, maybe four hours. Dr. a half patients began to experiment. You gotta try this and try that. Move the night here, moves like there. Move your Soviet here, move your subject there. Move your subject further or closer from your background. Objects in your photograph, like in this case, I had a marvel and a stone. I might want to put them closer together or further apart. And maybe like them separately. Put one line being the and on the stone and another lay narrow day and onto the marble. So these are something and all techniques that we have to take in consideration when you are setting up the planet yet, which brings us to you. It is action time. I want you to experience a mere try different backgrounds. Try different types of backgrounds, whether they be a printed piece or a disk law, whether they be physical or natural. And try to experiment with knights, see what verbs when different angles with different composers you can come up with. So your call to action is historic. Doing some magical over time of being started experimenting. In our next section, we will talk a little bit more in our rural illustrate a little bit more about focus stacking. See you in that lesson. 43. Introduction Focus Stacking for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So in this section we're going to talk about focus stacking. And I'm going to show you some techniques and some trips. I'm not going to illustrate everything like the focus well, because personally I don't own one, though. I will show you a focus well, in action too, you will get to see one in action. But I will not demonstrated live on camera are real, however, it was to aid in talk to you about hand-holding, manually focus that game and using H5P and manually focus stacking using the hand well and using software refer tripod to automatic focus stacking, as well as mainly focused at him with software. Because maybe you would like to do it all yourself. Just because the software can do it doesn't mean you have to. You can still manually focus that using software and I will show you how to do that. So that is what we are going to learn in this section. 44. Basic Fundamentals Focus Stacking in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So there are times in photography when it is impossible to have every day tack sharp and in focus. That is especially true when we are dealing with Michel photography. Even when we are using our f-stop, stopped all the way down to the tiniest pinhole, have 22. Or even if they're ready to apply our meals, we start running into issues. We have light. Now enough light to the sensor to give us a quick image. And we have high noise because we have to bump our ISO to compensate or slow down or shutter speeds so much that we start introducing camera shake. Now even if we are on a tripod, you're on a tripod and we can leave our shutter open for as long as we need. Keeping the ISO 100. We still cannot have everything packed sharp. Now at the macro photography distance that we are using, because the closer you are to your subject, the thinner that depth of field. So even an F 22, everything cannot be tack sharp. Now, there are ways to combat this. Keep in a parallel plane. That means that your camera is perfectly parallel with your subject. That keeps that focal plane level so that everything can be in focus on that plane. But remember, the focal plane is razor thin as now there is raised with there. So even if you step back just Millimeters, Millimeters back, those items fall out of focus. So if you have a object or subject that has texture or death layers to it, that flat layer might be in focus, but everything else to be out of focus. So how do we combat deaths? That's simple. That is where focus stacking comes into play. Now we don't always have to focus that. Sometimes our desired up that is a narrow depth of field. But we just want an isolated part of our picture to be in focus and everything else is blurred out. That's very easy photography. But if you weren't everything tack sharp, Let's get into focus stacking. 45. Manual Hand Held Focus Stacking in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So let's talk about train to handhold camera while you are trying to stack your pictures. One of the things that you're going to want to take into consideration is, does your Lean's towel stave ability? This is going to be very important that on your Lean's, you have stability. If you have that and make sure you turn it on so that it stabilizes your Lean's in try to keep it as steady as possible. When you're doing medical photography does this little bit of movement. We'll go off your pictures. Now. Are so you often want to make sure that on your camera on your camera dial. See right here on my camera dial. I have continuous CL and CAs. Continuous low and continuous high. You're going to want to have your camera set on CH from a continuous eye. You want to be able to snap off your pictures as fast as you can when you're trying to poke the stack and your focus stacking, you cannot clear. Click, click, click. That's not going to work on focus stacking your end up missing your shots. Because we're going to merge these images into one when we get into Photoshop or electron focus, whatever software you're using. And we have to make sure that we have every point, every day with a focus picture so that we can merge them all and get one big rain picture. There's a everything's in focus. So you're going to want to rapid fire your shots, not single shot. You're going to learn a rapid fire. Now because of that, you cannot meet focusing. So you might as milk turning your autofocus to off, turn it off. It's not going to work when you're applying a handhold focus stacking. Now with me, I don't have to turn mine off. I can leave mine on because I misunderstand an earlier lesson. I focus. So once I get my focus log D and I can take them back down. After that. I don't have to remember the camera trying to refocus again. If your focus is still tied into your shutter, release them every time you take your finger off, and then we'd pressure the canvas when a train refocus. If yours is still on short-term relief, you have to put the camera in manual for both this manual focus. If it's on a back button, you don't have to. Because as long as you keep your DOM offer that back button, the camera we're not trying, we focus. So let me demonstrate how I do handheld. Let's say my subject is right here. Okay? So I have my subject right here. I've turned my camera on and make sure I've got, I'm using about an F sets, but I'm focused. I use an F 62 and MFA, I don't go any higher than that. If I'm handholding. The reason being I went out wide open aperture, I want it must lie company And as possible, the more like company and the faster my shutter speed can be, a slow shutter speed will get tumors camera shake in, every pixel, come out blurry. So I want a fast shutter speed. I want to be able to fire rapid fire, birth shots when you are trying to focus that you have to do this and your focus stacking, you can pick and choose, not like the regular photography. So I've got my camera setup on a fash, shutter speed at F stop 5.6. So that does show to be in that bass is still lit and enough lady and could give me a good image. And I'm on continuous buyer because I'm going to continuously rapid power. Now here's what I'm gonna do. What I do is I go ahead and I get my focus, lock on my salad with my and then I take my thumb off of it. Now I don't touch it again. Now. I'm not using the focus ring. I'm not trying to refocus. I'm going to take a series of shots just like this, just using my body. Now, if you look, my folder say is empty. I do not have any images in that folder contains no images. So now that I've got my focus law, the end, and you saw that I don't have any images in the camera. I'm going to shoot on a burst of chars dominating it down onto my subject. And I'm just going to hold the show, but okay. So as you can see, I did a rapid-fire and I slowly with moving forward, trying to maintain that straight line. You don't want to meet gone over the place. You want to maintain a straight line. Just like when the software doesn't automatically, you set your closest point in your furthest point, and then it takes a series of pictures in between, and it's moving in a straight line. You've learned to do the same thing when you're trying to hand hold focus stack. You want to maintain its 30 years possible story at the beginning or the font. And slowly moved through to the back to that eats layer. Eats level is getting focused Picture and name and you merge them together. You'll have from the front to the back of your subject in focus. Now when I did that, if you look right here on the camera, it say like took roughly 15 pictures. 15 pictures. And you can see I was taken a picture of my life. I was taken a picture of the on and off squids on my LED light. Not a good subject, but that's what I was using for this demonstration. So that is pretty much focus stacking. When you are trying to handhold locking your focus, then go for it. If you're using backbone fish, you can do that. If you're not using that focus and your focus is tied into your shutter button. Like it comes default there. Make sure your camera is in manual, manually, get that initial focus CDN. And then when you put the camera up to you, I like the idea. Readapt GUI back and forth until it gets into focus. When the very fluid is in focus, lay down on the shutter button in, just work through it in a straight line until you get to the back of it or your buffer on your camera fills up and you can no longer take any more pictures. That is handheld. Focus stacking. 46. Manual Using a Tripod for Focus Stacking in Macro Photography: Hey, welcome back. So on our last lesson, we could try to focus stack by hand hold in our camera. Now we're going to take it a step further and we're going to introduce a tripod. Now, when you use an h5 part, the first thing you want to do is make sure you turn off the image stabilization, turn that off. You never want to have that on. When you are using a tripod, it will actually introduce camera shake. You only want to have that ion when you're handholding. The next thing I recommend you do is you go ahead and put it in manual. Focus. Your focus, even though you're on a tripod and you could possibly try to use the autofocus. Such close magnification out of focus just is not adequate when you are trying to do Michel photography. Now, I have demonstrated in prior lessons the software using out-of-focus. So I've got to carry now mounted on a tripod. I'm going to turn my camera on. I've got my camera in manual focus. I've got vibration turned off. The next day you're going to want to do whenever you are on a tripod, is turn on your light, you turn that on. You don't want to reach find that used the viewfinder. Now a position your camera, move your head, you can move your Soviet movie. It is not position your camera. And what you learned is to square focusing data that you will see on your camera and your LCD screen. You blend it on the closest thing to you, to very close to stain to you. And you want to get that tack sharp. So just your focus. And our tail. That item is tack sharp, sharp, right there. Perfect. I am tack sharp. Very fun piece and my cat, my subject. Now, another thing you're gonna wanna do, if you have a remote, use it, use it. You have a remote, use it. If you do not have a remote for your camera, then put a mirror in, lock locking mirror up. If your camera can do that. If you can or cannot do that. If it has a 2 second timer, set it up on the 2 second time, but anything you can do to keep your hands off the camera. Now, I'm going to be used in a bit more. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to activate my remote up to now. Now with my read mode, I can actually have options. I can either do mirror, I can do take the picture or I can do to second timer all from the remote. I'm just going to put it on just normal remote. Okay. Well, I've got that setup. Now. I'm ready to take my first pictures from or take the first picture. There's one. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm having to do this all manually. I'm going to turn my focus ring. Light really impair the next portion comes into focus in it again. During my focus screens, yes. Lightly. Lightly. Yeah. And I'm gonna keep doing that until I've gone from the flood that my subject all the way to the back. It may be five pictures, it may be 20 pixels, maybe 30 pictures. But you're going to want to keep doing that. Turn it slightly. Take your picture, turned slightly. Take your picture until you've covered from the front to the back. That is how you focus that using a tripod. 47. Manual Focus Stacking Using a Focus Rail in Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So now let's talk about a focusing. Well. Now this is a focusing well, and as you can see, it mounts onto a tripod and many Mountain your camera onto it. And it gives you control of your camera. Now, just like when we did the manual focus stacking with to try part in the last lesson. We're focusing wheel works on the same principle. The difference is, instead of turning the focusing ring to readjust the focusing points, you actually physically moving the camera millimeters at a time. Very precise movements on the focusing. Well, let's look at a video of that in action. Like I mentioned, I do not own a focusing well, so I cannot personally demonstrate, but I do have a short video that does illustrate ready focusing well does. Here you can see the focusing well and see what it looks like. Things you will need a camera mounts up to it. There's diodes so that we can make micro adjustments. Here you can see the proteins well in action AT user and F6, ISO 100 bucks 30 of a second, did you see how he was slowly having to adjust? It would make it a make one adjustment and then hit in a shutter, making a macro adjustment, getting a shutter, magical adjustment hidden the shutter, just like when I did it with the focusing. When I returned to focusing we in an hour take the picture, turn the focusing rain, and take the picture. And basically that's what focus stacking is. It's going from front to back and taken a series of pictures so that you get a different piece of the puzzle in focus. In just like a puzzle, you merge them all together in software. 48. Manual Focus Stacking Using Software for Macro Photography: Hi, welcome back. So now let's talk about software. Night showed you a little bit about software at the beginning of the course. But let's go into a little bit more detail. First thing you're going to want to remember is when you're using software, you're going to want your camera on a tripod. You're going to want vibration control turned off. We're going to wet your automatic focus turned on. You have to have automatic pocus when using software. Otherwise, the software won't be able to adjust the focus. It can't physically turned focusing ring. So automatic focus has to be turned on. Also, you want your camera in manual mode, aperture or shirt. It's got to be in manual mode so that the software can take control of the camera and make adjustments. Now, this first section is going to be on manually. Tell the camera where you want to focus attic, take your pictures. So selective focus. If you look here, I'm going to bring up Ilya can't book is we're going to use that software for this demonstration. Doesn't matter what software you're using. They all work about the same. Sometimes I'm using DC KM. But for this demonstration I'm going to use helium ion. So here you can see helium being seated. I'm booked up to my D 750. My exposure mode is on manual. My shutter speed is one, 327 seconds. I'm going to drop that down to 50 or 70 seconds. My aperture, that F6, my ISO is at 100. I tried to keep my ISO is lowest possible. Anytime I'm doing my chromatography. You don't want any excess noise. Okay, now, this bottom part here, the focus bracket one are going to look at. Yet, we will look at that in more detail when I get to the automatic. Right now we're doing manual focus bracketing using the software. Right below that, if you look down here where it says focus, focus is turning on my my blinkers is the blue is tell me what's in focus. So if I turn that off, no longer see that. I got that turned on. So I would go up to our focus up the top. And then I will click somewhere in the image where I want to point this out. Say right here. Okay? And then I would capture, I would say take picture. And I would move Galileo. That process, if you are using wireless, like I like to use, is a little bit slower. If you are tethered by USB cable, it's a little bit faster. Keep that in mind. Cable is always faster. Now as you can see here, this is way too bright. It show me an image we're creating is shown it is way too bright. So maybe I do need a bump down or speed up a little bit, or turn my flash down. Maybe even open my amperage you up just to that. There's open the aperture up to say eight. For that I'm litany and just a little bit less light. Now let's take that picture again. Let's let that one process. I'm totally hands off on the camera when I'm using software. That's why I like doing it with software versus using a focusing well. Focusing well is you have to have hands on each time you make your adjustments. If you manually turn it into focusing ring, that's still a little bit right there, a little bit like. So what I can do now is I'm going to actually adjust brightness on my place here. So I'm going to turn my flashy and I'm currently at quarter power. I'm going to turn it down to fit in power and water. There's 16 power. Let's take another picture and see how that one looks. Now a lot of times, even if I'm going to use the automatic bracketing to do my focus stacking. There were still step you have to go through when setting up the shot and you gotta get your lighting. Remember I told you earlier it can take hours to get a good microbiota biography project done now starts and you can just jump in and do, takes patience, it takes time. And that's a little better. That's a little better is not as bright, not as bloat out. I like that. So I'm going to leave those settings there for this demonstration. Next, I need a buy me a new focusing points. So I've got my first picture. Now let's see, let's say just go right in here. Yeah, see how it changed to blue. Okay, that looks good. And I will take that picture. Now let's see what's next out of focus that I get done processing. Okay, so there's the image. Now let's see, let's go back over here to our focus. And let's see, I'm thinking like maybe in IR, this right here, looks like it might be out of focus. Okay. Yeah. So then I had to take that picture and aggregates, keep walking. Do it, keep walking all the way until I got to the back of the image step by step. Now this is a little bit more tedious because you're having to tell the camera eats picture but to take. But some of you might like that. You might like having 100% control and manually turn the camera step by step to take. And you can do that. So this is how you would manually focus stack using the staff where by indicating its picture on your own. Next we will look at using the automatic features that does everything for you. 49. Automictic Focus Stacking Using Software for Macro Photography: Okay, welcome back. So in our last lesson we talked about manually doing this. Now we're going to talk about doing it automatically with the software. Now I showed you this already, but just as a quick reminder, if you're going to automatically do it, this jumping to the software. Okay, so here we are in the software. So what I need to do, I need to click on my out-of-focus. I need to find the closest point to me. The very closest point to me. Now, I can tweet deck Yes, a little bit using my arrows. But for this demonstration, I'm going to go ahead and lock in a, I'm going to say That looks good. Now I'm going to back step. Do the picture. See how I'm back step and through the picture until I get to what I think is the back of the picture and that looks like that would be the back at the picture. And I'm going to lock in B. Now I have my B. It says a 125 pictures. If grills jumping two sharps out of time, that would be 64 pictures. Now I don't want to jump that much, not for the sake of this video. So let's say, I guess wanna do 20 pictures. And you'll have to play around and decide what works best for you. But if I say 20 pictures done, it's going to take a series of 20 pictures and it's going to jump seven out of time. So then all I have to do is go up to the top in here. Storage shooting, not take picture because that's just going to be one picture. Storage shooting in the end just like before. The camera is going to take, in this case, 20 pictures. It's going to jump back to the client. And it's going to do 20 pictures. Yeah, I jumped to the plant, was taking the picture, is going to process it. And then it's going to move on to the next line and so forth until it takes off 20 pictures. Again, a little bit slower when your using Wi-Fi versus tailoring repair USB cable. Now I'm gonna go ahead and hit Stop shooting. I'm not going to do all 20 pictures. Let me go ahead and hit Stop shooting. You can stop at any time. And so there we have use in software regardless of his program you're using. For manually telling Sappho pictures you want to take what you've learnt in focus or using the bracket team automatic feature, where you designate the starting point and the starting point. How many photons you want to take, how many times you want the camera to jump and let the camera do it all for you. That's normally how I like to do my focus stacking, whatever works for you is great. And I will see you in the next section. 50. Your Focus Stacking Macro Photography Project: Welcome back to that, completes the section on focus stacking, whether you're doing it manually and holding it automatic. Using a focusing well, you can even get electron focus on your phone. If you go to the Play Store or the App Store, you can download for free, electron focus. Use your phone to control your camera. So the options or they are for doing this, stacking. Your call to action. I want you to do some focus stacking. Tried to do it manually, try give handhold. If you have a tripod, put it on a tripod, and try to just focus that by turning now, focusing ring, baby steps and taking your pictures. If you have a focusing, well, excellent. Try that. If you have the software, try that. Your call to action is he simply do some focus stacking, see how you can get it from the front to the back. Everything in focus by taking a series of pictures. I mean, we will process those pictures in software. See you in our next section. 51. Introduction Macro Photography Project: Hi, welcome back. Can you believe it? We are almost to the end of the course. In this section, we're going to do two hands are in projects. The first one, I'm going to do a water bubble refraction. And we're going to get any image and we're going to make it show up in our water bubble. The second project is just going to be a general piece of art. In when you're doing macro photography, there are different avenues that you can take. Some you might be working too dark and mere, small plants and insects, inanimate objects. Some of you might be working to create our wall or that you can hang on your wall a conversation piece to talk about over dinner. That is more of the style of photography. I like. I like the arm, the fine art by chromatography. Yes, I do photograph flowers and I do photograph insects in tiny objects. But my main focus that I enjoy is creating a piece of orange. And because of that, I don't care if it's recognizable. Sometimes I don't want it to be recognizable. I want it to be a piece of art. In when I get into my processing, data shows I don't have to follow the wolves. I can opt to the colors. I can alter different aspects of my image to make it into art. And that's what I enjoy. So hopefully, as you've been taking this course, you have learned something. And rather you're here to learn how to document and keep Danes true to life. Whether you're new to make a piece of art. I'm hoping that you have picked up some tips and tricks along the way. So without further ado, let's get into or two hands-on projects. 52. Basic Fundamentals Macro Photography Projects: Hey, welcome back. So the basic fundamentals of my chromatography or a project that really are not unique. The main fundamental is to have fun, to experiment, to explore, to try different techniques and different approaches to try using the light here or there. You try using this background versus that background. Just have fun experiment. Don't be afraid to fail. When you see professional photographers and they're showing you their work and you're like, Wow, how did he do that? But they're not telling you is yes. They created a beautiful image in everybody wants it. Do not telling you that date bill 100 times prior to getting that one, professional photographers fell. We all do Michel photography is not an easy task in sometimes reach Bell, not because of our own skill, but because of Danes out of our control. Let's say you're doing a water bubble in New York, photograph in it. And we're having to focus stack because we want everything in focus in. We get about halfway through it and it putts. Have to start all over again. Well, let's save your photograph and a bug in the bug is being goodness B and I talk and we get about halfway through it and he gets up and walks away. How it happened. So professional photographers fail just as much as anybody else. They just don't tell you they do. So don't be afraid to try new things and new techniques. And let's get started on our projects. 53. Macro Photography Project One, Water Drop Refraction, Items Used: Hi, welcome back. So let's get started on our first project. Now on this first project, I told you we're gonna do a walk-through bubble reflexion. Now, when I'm deciding to do for my background, this is what I use all the time. But I have future board with a piece of black construction paper to the front of it. How it's used just for my background because I like a black bag. Well, now I also have this black bars that I use quite a bit and I used the place it next to my background. And that just gives me an elevated platform to work on. Proper object that I want to reflect into my water bubble. I have a little plaque of some elephants. Elephants. Now the class back behind them sparkles. You really can't see it good here. But when the light hits it, it actually sparkles. So I'm going to have these elephants, we've tracked it into my water bubble. Now remember when you are doing reflection photography, you have to position this upside down because it's going to be mirrored. That way it'll come up right-side up. I'm going to put this onto my backdrop area. Next, I need to have my foreground object. And for that, I'm using my third hands. And you'll see why do you on this alligator clip, I have a plant and I'm going to position my water droplet using my Serbians. I'm going to position plus it drops and drops in those little plants will work like a cup to create all my water glob into podium into place. I also have on this other third hand, my light in that light will be used to light up my background. Because you have to like your background separate then your foreground. So what other items are going to be using for you? I suppose, yeah, Maybe username Sue Ann's for my water droplets. I'm using glistening in the water and the listener solution. That way gives my watch your bubble more stable ability and they will evaporate or pop on me as past gives me more time to work because I may have to do some focus stacking. And when you are both the stacking that is a little bit more time intensive. So you might your setup to last longer. Okay. Of course I've got my microphone aliens. I'm going to be using my timeline, 90 millimeter microbe on my Nightline, the 750 full-frame camera body. So that's pretty much all of my tools that I'm going to be using. If I have to introduce anything else, I will let you know, like a flash or more light. I will let you know as we get into the project. So on the next lesson, we're going to start the actual project. 54. Macro Photography Project One, Water Drop Refraction Scene Setup: Hi, welcome back. So now we're going to do or the egg. Now I had to do a change of plans because my original item there hours Merton to use wouldn't work. For some reason my water droplets just button hold that kept whatnot fall off. So instead I've changed over to a blade of grass. In that happens. Remember we talked about how professional photographers even we fail sometimes. And I've done that same technique plenty of times in the past, but for some reason they didn't want to work for me today. So I failed. And I felt in and I improvise and I change strategies. And I found something that didn't work for today's lesson. So I'm going to be usually a blade of grass as my foreground object in my water bubble will be sitting on that. So let me show you my current setup. Here you can see I have my plaque an upside down against my dark background. The background really doesn't matter in this case because you're not going to see it anyways. But I like you have a dark background just in case I do, for some reason have a little bit of my image is actually not completely blowing a frame. You can see right here, there's just a blade of grass that are changed to an electricity, just to give a little bit of texture of electricity. Here you can see my light. This light is currently not turned on, but it will be illuminating the elephant plaque. Here you can see the camera. You can see my my story ends down here at the bottom. I'm gonna be using IRR to place my water droplet onto my, my blade of grass. And in this last image here is just again, being ClO it closer. You can see the blade of grass. You can see how I'm using my third hands. I'm using my light map-like and everything is setup. Now one thing I do want you to see is that, I mean, a perfect parallel plane. My camera is set in perfectly level with my water droplet and my background behind. Now, it's important that you keep that plane. That way your image will show up properly into your water droplet. It'll be nice and centered. So my next step is to place my water droplet. Now I'm going to change over to helium economy mode so that you can see everything that has gone on. So from Pier one out, we will be in helium can remote. Okay, So here you can see Ilia on remote and you can see the blade of grass. And notice how the background kind of has that purple is colored to it. Now let me turn on the light less than eliminate the background. And that looks pretty good. But my blade of grass and the phone is a little dark, actually shooting out. If you'll look over here, I have this setup at F8 for my aperture, my ISO is set at one hundred two fiftieth of a second. Let's take a practice shot. So I'm going to first make sure that I'm focused on that blade of grass. There we go. Now, let's take a practice sharp. So take a picture. Here we go. Let that process and we'll see how it looks. Very dark, right? That tells me I don't have enough light in my picture. As you can see, I'm family might. Well, you want to know why? I can just show you why. Look at my shutter speed. My shutter speed is at 250th of a second. Now normally I'm using flash. Normally I'm using flash when our setup, if this setting. So I'm going to turn back last night LED light and I'm going to hook up my flashcard, but flashing with my SN2 so that I can diffuse the light. And I'm going to hook that up to the camera. So let me do that now. Let me turn that on and let's see what happens. I take a shot now. So here we are. Back to our scene. I'm going to remove external like now. I'm not, don't have any 1937. And it's just going to be the flash to hears that picture. Take a picture. My flash is set at one 16th power there. See how this looks. Now I'm getting the picture. I'm no longer black, however, is kind of a little bit dark. So I think I'm gonna do, I think I'm going to move the power or math class to 1 eighth power. Let's try that. 1 eighth power. And less take another picture. Now you notice I haven't put a water droplet audio yet because I don't wanna do that. Intel, I'm actually ready, dictate the picture. I guess readjusted my focus. Let's take another picture at 1 eighth power. On my flash. This is a game of patients. You have to work through it step-by-step and see how things look until you eventually get to your final exam. And I like the lighting of that. That looks good. So now it's time to add a water drop. So let me get my Syrians and let's add a water drop. Who fell off? There we go. Baby steps don't try to be too fast building up. These are hypodermic needle. The water naturally want to get off of. Looks pretty good. I like it there. I'm not going to push my luck. I'm not going to try and getting them bigger. So I'm not going to push my luck. Have a wonderful app. Now. I want to be focused on that water drops. So I'm gonna go back here and I want to focus on the drought. So I'm going to click out of focus in and click on. And I don't like that. That does not look good. Let's try that again. Autofocus does not always work. Sometimes you have to manually focus, are made, have to focus that these. So I'm thinking in order to get a good image, that's what I'm going to want to do. I'm going to want to focus stack. So I'm going to tweak my camera over there so a little bit. But the water glob more towards the center. I'm going to turn on my focus. I can see my blink 0s, but I want this leaf and focused. I worked the water drop in focus all the way to the back. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to focus in on the fun of this leaf on this point is right here. Now my water droplets good and focus, but I'm not focused on one of the leaf and I went to, but you know what I'm thinking? By lean and over L, not, don't always rely on what you see on the screen. Lean around, look about to move your body. I think I need to be right here. My artist focuses and working as good to let him now physically doing here is instead of China autofocus, I'm moving the camera itself because I want to get disparate areas appear. It's what I'm trying to give in our May of being just a little bit too close and oil do you get depth? Client is in focus. Now. I've got it. Now I've got it, I heard it to be. So I had to physically move my camera a little bit. That's where knowing what your minimum focal distance comes into play out. So I'm good. There. I'm going to lock daddy and as my point, but there is my flight. Now, I'm going to back it up and tell the back of starts to come into focus. Let me see. I think that looks pretty good right there. I like that. I'm going to lock the Hadean now. I don't want 58 pictures. I'm going to change this just like I guess my chain pictures for this demonstration. And I'm going to go up here to the top and I'm going to hit Start shooting. Now I'm not going to make you sit through all 10 of these pictures, so I will fast-forward to the end when it is done. Okay, I'll obtain images are now done. I can open these up and helium focus and go ahead and process them. Or I can open them up in light room into my edges day or resist. But I'm going to do, I'm going to say, no, do not want to open these up and helium can't focus. Gets, I like to put them into light room first, tweak them a little bit in NY and send them either to Photoshop or helium can focus to merge them together. So I'm going to hit no. And that is it for taken this image. Now again, this is washed for the sake of the demonstration. If I was actually doing this outside of the classroom, I would take my time and I would experiment a little bit more. 55. Macro Photography Project One, Water Drop Refraction: Hi, welcome back. So we just finished our first project and I want to show you the picture. Now. I don't edit my pictures so far. For this course. I've been showing you exactly what I've gotten straight out of the camera. You need that is that I do or minor Lens Corrections, camera calibration, minor stuff. We are going to have a section just aren't photo editing, where I will walk you through my workflow on what I do when I'm editing my pictures. Let's look at that picture that we just did and we're going to talk about it now. I'm not very happy with it. I would of redone it and I might still redo it. I like the outcome. I like the technique that I'm using for this particular picture. So yes, I am my decide to redo it. Now, me point out a couple of obvious things that I don't like. One, if you look over here on the layer and even photo stack deep enough, I probably should have weird another buys pictures or so. I didn't go deep now because over on the right, this is our nice, nice and in-focus, good texture. Bubble is a little bit out of focus. My water drop, that blade of grass was setting out an angle so it was not perfectly straight across parallel, it was at a slight angle. So the back over here where my mouse is now in that water dwell actually sat a little bit back from the front versus over here on the right. So I should have photo stack a little bit more. Now, those are so you can see my flash, see the white dot right here inside the water drop. You can see where my class was, was triggering for East picture. So how does, but I have fixed out easy. I don't have a math class to aid on common offered a camera like I had it. Maybe take my, my flash should put it off camera so that is coming in from outside, then it wouldn't show up, it's bad, maybe not even used to flash. I could have stayed with my LED light, my flashlight that I had at the initial setup. And instead of putting a flash but glut my shutter speed down so that the shutter stays open longer. By staying open longer, it would let more light in. In my little tourists, my little LED flashlight may have been powerful enough to line up the image. So there's different things I can do. One thing that I noticed a lot of photographers when they are showing you their work, like in a chorus or in a book, they are showing you the absolute finished product. Um, that like there. I show you what you will typically see if this is you've taken the picture. And I'm not going to go in and I'm not going to edit the pictures and clean them up in Photoshop home and get them all nice and spectacular in Nim shown to you? Yes, that is how the image is going to look when I'm completely done. But that's not how it's going to look straight out of camera. And what's going to happen is you're going to look at your image. And then you're going to look at that image that was all dark Good up. And you're going to be like work. And you're gonna get, you're gonna get frustrated, and you're going to possibly give up. I've seen it too many times. I've seen too many. Good beginner photographers simply give up because don't get no resolve that they are seeing from other professional photographers and we can't do that. We can't do that. So I don't do that. I don't Dr. Mike, images or before are shown to you. I'm not in it for the money. I'm a professional photographer. I'm retired. I'm also a professional English teacher. I teach English here in Thailand and I teach for typography. It's all about sharing my knowledge with you. I'm going to show you exactly what I got out a camera. Now is this bill I would stop at on this picture. Let's go back to the picture. There's this brava stop bad on this picture? No, I wouldn't stop here. For one. I probably would have we done in a photoshoot again and try to get a little bit better. But let's say I did. Let's say I went ahead and decided to use this picture. Well, before I export it back out into light room, why I've still got it in Photoshop. After a vocal focus, stacking it. I can go through and I clean up this edge, this edge right around water glob. I can clean that up in Photoshop. I can go ahead and do that. And this leaf over here, not believed this blade of grass over on the left. I might have been able to actually block some of the focus back into that by doing some manual. It is masking brain and me and look into all my images that I took and seeing if it was when I was little bit sharper over here does have to be much, just a little bit sharper, little bit more in focus in the en-masse Guinean that, to bring this into focus a little bit better. So there's other edits are not doing those edits. This is not about photo editing in giving you some big image, I want you to see. What I'm getting is pretty much what you're going to give. You always might be better. Laws might be worse. I'm a home with a photographer and I know there's other photographers out there. Do somebody you may make me look like I'm an amateur in your professional. That's perfectly fine. You're not going to bruise my ego 1-bit. You're not going to hurt my ego. So I've heard of if this is outside project for this course and I was still working on it, I was still working on this MHz. I would clean it up a little bit more or maybe even reshoot it. And I might spend 45 our last minute day am I spent a couple days on a project tweaking it, trying different things. Remember, this was done in black for time span of about ten minutes. How perfect protection can I be in ten minutes? Okay, We got one more project to do. And I'm not going to do a water bubble combat like this. It's not going to be a focus stack this time. I'm just gonna do a normal microbiota target big picture. And I'm not going to focus that it. So I'm gonna intensely have selected focus on my subject. And a lot of the other stuff blurred out. So that'll be Project 2. Coming up next. In our next section, we will actually, like I said, getting to my workflow and I will show you some ways that I like to edit little things that I do. Somebody when you might like some urban, you might not. We all have our own style. I'm going to show you my style now to be in the next section. And in this course is pretty much done. Congratulations if you've stuck with me this far. Thank you. The stock project number 2. 56. Macro Photography Project Two, Fine Art, Items Used: Hi and welcome back. So now we're going to start on a project to and as I was looking around client, they decide what I wanted to photograph this time. I remember that I had some petals, small yellow and purple. And I was thinking what those look like. They might be interesting to incorporate into my picture. Nice colors. But what else? I don't just want a yellow and a purple pedal. And then as I was eating breakfast this morning, I love pink and Malaysia saw. And I was, I know that almost like saying a good texture. So I brought that up. If you remember a few lessons back, I showed you a lock and a marble. We were talking about backgrounds in using a digital background. So I've got that black girl. And I figured, okay, I'm going to put this into my picture and I really liked the reflection that I was getting. So I cleaned up my phone with some alcohol. Got it all nice and clean. In. I'm putting all my objects onto my phone to give me a reflection. Now, from my background, I actually found at peace or glitter paper, the silver, silver glitter paper. And I really like the way it loads. So I put that onto my backdrop. So I'm incorporating different elements into this photoshoot. Going to be using flash again. But this time instead of having a flash dedicated onto the camera, I've got off-camera flash. So that's going to give me a different lighting scenario. I'm going to be using DCM this time, last time or budget line I used a leader can remove. This time. I'm really using DC cam control. Now before we jump into the project, can I show you more on the scene setup? Inaccurate, taken some pictures. On my off-camera flash. I'm using my receiver is that I showed you in the gear section of this course. So one will be mounted to my camera, and one will be mounted to the flash here, this is the receiver. So it'll go on math class. But so flash, that will enable me to control my flash off camera. Now this had been different. Flash diffuser is homemade member that became the batch showed you earlier in the course. It had to corn chips in an activity I really loved him. Black finish those off. And I decided, you know, that's going to make a good diffuser is a little bit bigger, a little bit more of a circumference, and a little more of light, but still be able to diffuse to endowed with delight down the barrel of the can. So only ever using this diffuser instead of my Pringle candid I use in Project 1. So let's jump on into the next lesson. I will show you a quick setup on how everything looks when it's all set up. And then we will take some pictures. See you in that lesson. 57. Macro Photography Project Two, Fine Art, Scene Setup: Hi, welcome back. So before we store it, I want to show you what the scene looks like. So let me show you that now. So you can see my camera. I'm using a different snoop this time on my flash year versus our camera. I still have my life. I hope that if two user know diffuser of my job is to sway back. There, is that literally papered at I found very seen above my my my, uh, peak and beliefs or OLS, my phone as my general setup. Okay, so that is my general setup. None fancy. The good data, but MakerBot target for you don't mean a large working area, just a little small corner. The main danger is your lighting. Make sure you've got good lighting and bring your creativity. If you can imagine it, you can do it. So let me turn on DC KM for you. In this is looking through the lens. This is what my camera is seeing right now. This is what my camera is seeing. Pretty interesting. Maybe a little bit busy? Yes, I agree. Could be a little bit busy. Right here is we're on folks there right in the center or nymphs portion of that pink and bilayer salt. You can see the purple and the yellow pedestals. Big object, that's my walk in the end, the silver in the background, that is the silver literary paper that I'm using for my back. Well, so let's take a picture of this. Make sure I'm in focus. Now, captured. Okay. Now, I could focus on the bark or up here, or this solution up in Europe. I could tie in focus just on one pair of store. And that was a big fail. So you were talking about when we say that out of focus sometimes does not work. I would probably have to manually focus if I want to do that. And it's not working now, I have two options. I can physically go to the Lean's in time, manually publish it here, or I can use my arrows on the bottom. Let's do that. Let's use my arrows on the bottom. So I'm just going to click and I'm going to slowly work my way even on my focus. I think. Looks good. That's real jobs. There we go. Keep moving. My arrow is in K. It looks like I'm not going to be able to get that into pockets, which is why out-of-focus malfunction. Beak, hers. We are too close. We are to coast. Remember that all lenses have a minimum focusing distance. Even micro lenses. Yes, we can get in very close for my booleans, but even a micro lens has a minimum focus distance in. Right now I am to close. The only way I'm going to be able to get depth flow parallel into focus would be to move my camera back a little bit. I don't wanna do that. I actually, as I was playing around with the bulk, is just now I saw this picture and I'm like this. The stone looks like just a little bit more in focus. This foot pedal or the side petal over here. It's kinda been focused. I like this. I want to capture that picture. Perfect. I like the way that looks. Okay, so as you can see, I could play about this scene, American move, focus in and out. I can make different adjustments. But I like the way this picture right here it looks. Some of those pink salt is in focus, so I'm going to purchase those are in-focus. Our Listserv is out-of-focus. Remember I told you we're now focused stacking this time, I want to create a piece of art using selective focus in I like when I see right here. So we're going to start for this project. Again, this is very short. Most of my applying judgment, I'm actually doing this for myself or hours not met. So this finishes off the section on our projects. And our next section will go on and do some photo editing. And I'm going to show you my workflow. And I'm going to use this picture, this picture right here for my workflow. So I hope you enjoyed this little project and the picture that we just took. And in our next section, when we do the workflow, I'm going to edit this picture. I'm going to bring out the colors. A little bit of tweaking, little bit of odds in the end, the allied to do on all my images. And then that will end this course. See you in the next section. 58. Macro Photography Project Two, Fine Art: Hey, welcome back. So my original plan was to show you this here means as we were editing via to stammer is from Project 2. However, I made a fatal error in accidentally decision in the video that I recorded OF MY editing the picture. Therefore, I'm just going to show you the picture. And we will still do the my workflow section, but it'll be on something dead, but some bonus, I'm going to take some bonus pictures in rewrote, added those in light room when I show you how I do my workflow. So here is the picture that we did from project 2 in this verse, the edited picture. Now it may be a little loud and a little boat for some people. For others, maybe not. I like it. Again, it is art. In order to start have to follow any rules or is what you see is how you interpret it. So this is how I saw my picture. This is what I envisioned. Nice, bright, bold, beautiful colors. And that is how I edited it. So again, there may be, to your liking, it may not to eat be our own. That is what is so beautiful. We all have our own opinions. And I would never criticize you for what you like. You have your own taste. I am mine, and you will have your own photography style. I'll have my own photography style. My job here today is to show you techniques and tricks that I use. And hopefully you will be able to apply some of them into your workflow. One section to go. And I'm going to show you my workflow on the stains that I generally do when I'm editing my pictures. See you in that section. 59. Marco Photography, Your Project: Hi and welcome back. I had so much fun doing number two projects. Now, some of you might not like them. Some new mind. That's okay, that's perfectly fine. Or it is in the eye of the beholder. And when I buying into lastname, it might not. So I'm hoping There you go out and you create your own piece of art. So that is your call to action for this section, I want you to start using your imagination to our thinking outside the box. Because as you saw when I showed you the scene setup, what it looks like on my table is not whether it looks like we could do it on the ends of a micro micro Lean's when you're up close your magnifying or subjects is a totally different scene there. What it looks like looking down onto the table from you to your call to action, create a piece of art or a document, a burger or a flower. That's where you'd like to do, do something, some pictures. Let's have some more fun with medical photography. And with that, I will see you in the next section where I talk to you about my workflow and how I like to edit my pictures. See you there. 60. Introduction Processing of Macro Photography Photographs: Hey, welcome back. So we've made it to the section on editing in our photographs. Now, I use light room almost 100% of the time. I very seldom go into Photoshop. Let us something precipitate or advanced that I just can't do in Lightroom. Example, poultry stacking. I can do HDR, I can do panoramas. I can do our planner stuff in light room, but I can't do focus stacking. So therefore I would have to use either Photoshop or he can't focus. But for everything else, light bulb is my go to software. If you don't have light room every day and I can do in Lightroom, you can do in dark table. Dark table is a free program. So for the rest of this section on photo editing, I'm not going to be using any Dane but light bulb. I'm not gonna go into Photoshop, really can't focus for anybody other softwares that we mentioned in this course. I'm just going to show you my workflow as it applies to light bulb. 61. Basic Fundamentals Processing of Macro Photography Photographs: Hi, welcome back. So some basic fundamentals of photo editing. Now with microbiota biography it especially when it comes to art. You can do all the wolves out the window. You can bend down, you can break on, you can ignore them completely. And that's what I like to do. That is why I'm so into macro photography as an art point. Now if I want a dark mitten, Vogue or a flower or something that needs to be true to life. Yes, I do follow the wolves. I don't get our elaborate. But for orange, I turned my creative juices loose. And I like to create bright colorful images. I like dark black backgrounds. So a lot of my pictures or dark color and that's how I like to get it. If you've seen or been watching on the photographs I've been presenting to you throughout this course, you'll notice a certain theme that applies. Almost our bodies. They are usually dark and mysterious with bright bold colors. And that is my style when it comes to micro photography, every photographer will create your own style. What works for me? May not work for you, but I like. You may not like, or we may have the same interests and you may agree with me 100%. That is when it's so unique and ready, so bass invading the bag that we can all have our own opinions. And I don't criticize you. And hopefully you don't criticize me. But if you do, that's perfectly fine. We're not going to hurt my feelings. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion and enrich that less distorted. Or in the next lesson, I will show you my workflow using Lightroom. See you there. 62. Adobe Lightroom My Basic Workflow: Hi, welcome back. So now let's take a look at a bonus picture that I happened to have. And we're going to look at it in Adobe Lightroom. And I'm going to show you the basic edits that I do. Now somebody's edits I applied to all pictures. Some I do not apply at all. It depends on the picture that I am working on at the time. We all have our own artistic layer when it comes to editing photographs. So let's jump into light room. Okay, So I've already loaded up boulder has just gotten one in it. And here you can see a rose is dying. It is dared, should be doled out. I kept it on purpose because I wanted to work with it. I took my water glistening in a mist. It is applied a mist slowly built up into water droplets so that it gave it a name. Shaming, wet look. Had dictate close to 50 pictures because I kept trying to capture this one water drop. See this one water drop down here on the bottom. I wanted to capture a drop drip and are just dying wolves almost like a tear. That's like a single tier of growl dropping off of it. And I finally was able to do that, took me about 50 tries. I would have to put my glistening drop on there, let it run down and gesture that storage glob buyer my camera. And I kept doing that until I got it, treats its micro photography is all about patients. Okay, so here we have this rose. Now the very first thing I do, basic edits. The first thing I do is I go to lineage correction. If you look over here on the right, I dropped down towards the Lean correction. It'll automatically recognized but Leonardo use and apply those corrections the next day, nor do they go up to the Basic tab. Up at the top where it says profile. I changed from Adobe color. I will click on that little grid or one for y. And I will select my camera, my dv 750, and then either close that window. Those are two basic quick edits that I do on every picture. The next one I like to do, and I could go into my white balance, my temperature to go up to custom. And I will cycle duty to buying the one that I like. They have difficultly. Your flash fluorescent. I don't like. The one I actually like is the daylight. The day line is is that daylight here? Now, the next day I like to do, I like to go down to my exposure and I'm going to brighten it up, maybe just a little bit. So by click or in the slider and then use my arrow key, I can climb is intense of a star. And that looks good about like they're just slightly brighten it up just a little bit. The next day. And I do, before I do anything else, before I, massive contrast highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, or anything else. I like to go down into my Detail panel. And I like to adjust my aluminum. This will take out any noise that may be in the picture. Now for this picture, there was no noise because we built into copier. I shouted at ISO 150th of a second, so there is no noise, but if there was noise, I would move this slider over on my luminous. In. The further you move it over, the more noise it takes out, it also softens your picture to now. When I do this is me. Whatever value I move my luminous too, I moved my detail are the same. And what that does is that brains back in detail at the picture by took too much detail OUT data, bring it back in the contrast. I usually go to about 25. Sometimes I may go to a 50, but usually about 25. It's about average for me. Color, color, take out any color artifacts that will be in your picture. I always move mine all the way over to a 100 in detail or road to a 100. You don't have to do that. That's just me. That's just but I like to do. Okay. So that takes care of my noise. Now, I will go back up good hectare for my sharpening. I do to noise burst. Always do noise before you do sharpening. Because if you have noise in your picture in you sharpen first, who is going to intensify that noise. So you're going to eliminate the noise burst didn't do your sharpening. Now sharpening. I liked the brain here. Finding out about 50 years, a good round about number up or down. You can adjust accordingly. My detail, just like with luminous, I like to match my detail with my sharpening to whatever my sharpening was. My detail iraqi do the same so woefully around BOP. Mascot. Now at mass scan, fiddly is a good number. But if you hold down your Alt key on a PC and then click on your Masson. That is invite, his butt's going to be sharpened where it is in black is now the fact that it does all the way to 50. It, but I normally like to do. You can see that it's done it yet a little bit more detail. If I want to have just certain areas of my image in focus, I can adjust this accordingly. 70 looks about good. It's not going to focus every day just like the fine lines around the world for this particular picture. And I'm thinking 75 looks pretty good too. I don't want to focus every day and I want some over to stay out of focus. And that looks pretty good. So let's close down the detail of how another thing I like to do and I can go down to calibration on the very bottom. And one particular ladder, I don't play around too much. You can, you can play around with these sliders, adjust your colors. Like if I moved away at all, we oversee how bright it made it back, take it back the other way. Meaning the task duration, I don't know, massive amount of cube tumors. Now blues, blues or different story blues are like the pink all the way up to 100. And it just gives the picture putts, gives it plants feels a little bit more vibrant years before and the after. It's starting to come a little bit more to life, okay. The next day and I like to do I don't do retaining transform. I don't think it Nemean anymore in color grading or color tones. I used it. I've met a young to meds. I'll go back up to basic aid in the basic. Now I'm going to change my contrast. I like to move my contrast up to about a 25 bury that vary depending, but right around 25 looks like a pretty good number of bore me my highlights. Highlights. I actually like to bring my highlights down just a little bit, bring them down just a little bit. Maybe about right there. My shadows are actually like to bring it up, bring him up a little bit, and ask Luke in maybe pretty good right around in there. And there you go. There you can see that I've adjusted my highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Making the picture gets little more punchy. For texture. Texture. I actually like texture in my picture is what I like to lug around a 50. Clarity. Clarity. I don't go down maybe around the 25 more. Dehaze. Same thing. It darkens the picture for me. So the more I'm gradient you to write, the more depicts your storage to dark and up a little bit. And I kinda like that right there, that looks pretty good. Babies. I do want to add little bit more on with the colors. Though. I will be marked by blowing until it looks kind of pretty good on all this is to taste. This is all good taste. But I like, again, you might not like this is all to paste. Saturation. I usually don't mess with. And that looks pretty good like here. So that's looking at the before and after. Now. You can see how my picture is coming to life is starting to get color, starting to get a little bit of punch to it. Okay, that's pretty much all for the basic. Let's close down the basic the next day. And I like to do is I like to add a vignette in that is under the desk tab. But before I do that, I'm very notorious about like in square images when it comes to my mock-up photography. So I'm going to click on the Cloud to go here to where it says original. And I'm gonna go to a one-by-one. I get asked, but I like, now I'm going to position this so that my dm is in the thirds, in my water glob is in the middle, but it's on the lower thirds in that looks pretty good. That way it around in there. And I'm going to hit Done. That's just what I like to do now. The next day no, I'm gonna do to finish off this. The M is for me, is you go down to a bets and I'm going to add a darker. So I'm just going to add up and I'm going to get bringing anything to it looks pretty good. And this gets put in a little bit of darkness because around EDS and that will help to draw your eye into the image. Now, this Go back to our basic panel, because now that I've darkened it up just a little bit, this water bubble is not quite as pronounced, is kind of dark, kind of mysterious. You can see it, but not quite as pronounced. So what I can do it, but when it too is, I could go up here and I could add a blush in, I could bring that back out and make it a little bit more pronounced. If I wanted to, I could add a blush and I could try and brighten it back up, but I actually like the way it looks. So I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to leave that alone. And there is my finished product. This is what I like. From here. I would just go up to File and I would export, and I would export it to my desktop or wherever photon put into the n rows of tier. The name that I picked out for this one, I'm going to go ahead and convert it to a JPEG, and I like to go 100%. I don't mess with the image resizing. I let deaths day like it is. I'm at 300% resolution. Sharpen for screen. You can do that if you'd like, and just hit Export. Okay, so now it is export team and we'll be done in just a second. Okay? So there is our image. Now there is one more thing you can do if you wanted to make this higher resolution so that you can print it. Like for a life-size picture on your wall of 30 by 30 or something even bigger, then you're going to want to enlarge this image in your resolution. And the way you do that is if you guessed, right-click on the picture and go down to essays enhance. See here we're say super resolution. There are double-edged the image versus Christian ideal for large display or presets. Usually it only takes about a minute. I like to unclick creates DAC 55 seconds. So now I'm going to hear enhance. And I'm going to enhance this picture and it's going to pretty much just enlarge it in. It's going to increase the resolution so that when you print it out, it doesn't get all distorted. So by enhancing your pictures, you can print them and they come out a lot better. Okay, So we'll finish. Now, if you notice I have two images. I have the standard image and I have the enhanced image. Here's the standard enemies. It is 4000 by 4000 resolution. The enhanced in the image is eight thousand, eight thousand resolution, or pretty most, the enhanced resolution in light room doubles. The pixel is doubles the resolution and enable you to be able to prepare your images at a larger size. Okay, so hopefully you got a little bit of idea on how I edit my pictures in Lightroom. Let's take a look at the finished picture. Here it is, and this is what I ended up with. Now, I like it. Some of you might, you might not. But I like it. It is my style of photography, dark, mysterious, bright colors. And that pretty much concludes the course on microbic Tartuffe. Now there are still a couple more lessons, but pretty modes. The bark of the chords is now complete. 63. Photo Editing, Your Project or Macro Photography Artwork: Hi, welcome back. So that was your turn. You've seen what Kayla style, I like my dean, the dark, colorful pictures. Now it's your turn to showcase your style. What kind of retirement for you or Canada or artists or you. In macro photography when we are creating or we can be as abstract as we write, the wolves do not apply. We can bend them, we can break them, DOM out the window. As you've seen me do. It can go as bold as you want or as mild as you want. You can go soft and dreamy. Look in what flashy in your face is R and R, it has no wolves. It's all abstract or not. It all depends on your style. So your call to action is to create a piece of artwork. If you're not doing artwork in your wantonness, stay true to life. Didn't do that as well. Is tone down. The adjustments that I showed you. Don't go as far to the left or to the right. Keep them kinda neutral. Just adjust accordingly. Intuitive picture lists by 2 you, this all up to your personal taste. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with in your call to action. Make some art or a documentary. 64. Conclusion and Thank You: Hi, welcome back. So when you're at the conclusion of our course, congratulations, man alone. Five hours of videos. Probably longer. Got, hopefully you didn't just lots from start to finish. You actually did the assignments. You have to leave power alone, you powers to video as needed to look up the items I told you to look up like information inspect on your lender is setting up your scene. Hopefully you took longer than IBS. I kind of wish to my scene setups in the projects for time sake on the video. But hopefully you took your time the new post and you went through and you came out with something fabulous. I know you did. I got confidence in you might have a carbon fee is so much fun and I hope you enjoyed it. I'm hoping that you take away from this course some of the following key points like knowing your gear, understanding how your gear works, knowing how to use your computer to take control of your camera. Hopefully, you learned how to focus DAC, whether you're handholding, we're doing it through software, through a focusing rail. Hopefully you learned how to make your mind go. Photos look better for artistic purposes or documentary. Hopefully you learn how to compose, how to use lighting properly. Hopefully, you were able to learn and make your own watered. Wow, we flashing picture. You didn't do that, right? If not, that's okay. My elephants came out. Pixel could have been a little better. And I'm gonna do it again. I'm not going to stop there. I'm gonna do it again. So that was just some examples and some of the veins and we learned, we learned a lot of other stuff too throughout this course. In my hope, is that you enjoyed it, made you picked up something that you can use as you further develop your skills in micro photography. 65. Showcase What You Have Learned: Hi, welcome back for the last time. But I would like to you could do is you can showcase your work. I would like to see it if at all possible. I would love to see what your ideas are. But your artistic talents, or can I enjoy looking at other people's work? I really sincerely do. I like looking at other people's work. It can glide while inspiration after the new. I'm not just an instructor. I'm a student too. And, and learn from you. I look at your work and I'm like, wow, I wonder how I can do it. I got exploration and enact BY to recreate it in my image. The way I see, you know, is original. When I was in college, I took graphic design. And when it attains that, my instructor told us they want whatever you think you have that you think is original is not. This is the 20th century. Every day has been done and done again and down again. So we all draw inspiration, are put everybody in. It's just a matter of going out and having fun and enjoying yourself. So showcase your work, showcase it. Show it, show it to the world shown to me. I want to see it in with dad. I wish you good health in good prosperities in whatever journeys life may take you. Until next time. Keep shooting and enjoy photography.