Author: DMcA

Photography can cover extremes in technique and dimension, from wide angle shots of expansive landscapes, to long exposures of the sea to the high speed capture of birds in flight. One area that up to now I have not explored is the world of very small things, otherwise known as Macro Photography.

Macro presents a few unique challenges that make it one of the harder genres of photography to master. Firstly, by definition, the subjects are very small, and this typically means the camera lens has to be very close up – maybe 2-3 inches away.

Secondly, special lenses are required that focus this close – called, unsurprisingly, Macro lenses. Being so close means that it is very easy to disturb the plant or insect, so getting a still subject is a challenge. And even if the leaf or flower is still, insects still insist on moving their legs about, making sharp pictures difficult. This means that the macro photographer can take literally hundreds of images before getting a portfolio quality shot.

Finally, the physics of lenses means that when very close up, the area of the subject in focus is very narrow, so it is very hard to get the whole subject sharp.. There are two solutions to this: firstly narrow down the lens aperture to increase the depth of field (like screwing your eyes up to see tiny detail), or secondly taking dozens of images, all focussed on different points on the subject, and then combining them in a method called “Focus Bracketing”. The first reduces the light to the lens enormously, so requires a flash to be used as well. And the second involves stacking 20-100 images together in a complex process. All of this is in addition to the other aspects of photography, like composition, colour etc.

It turns out that for lots of technical reasons, the Olympus and OMD cameras are perfect for Macro photography, and in fact are the choice of very many macro photographers who can use any brand they like. And once you have the camera, the lenses (or some of them) and ancillary equipment are not too pricey. A detailed post on why the OMD cameras are so good for macro will be in a later post. So I armed myself with all the kit and started taking Macro pictures in England and France. The photos below are what resulted. I hope you like them.

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Last November the Chickadee was in NYC over the weekend for a conference and suggested I come over to join her. In a previous life, I had commuted to New York every week for 12 years, and for 18 months during that period the Chickadee had an apartment down in the east village. So it would be nice to revisit old haunts and check out our favourite locations for dance, jazz and food again.

After 17 years this was my first return trip to Manhattan. We had an insanely good time, and I was reminded all over again why I travelled there so many times (around 500 visits).

As we were going to be zipping all around the city, I didn’t want to take a major camera kit with me. I brought my tiny Nikon 1 camera and an array of tiny lenses, with the vague aim of shooting some street shots and some river views. For most of the weekend, I didn’t get anything worth keeping. But on the last morning I went down to the Brooklyn bridge to get some shots at sunrise.

Afterwards I wandered into the nearby Wall Street area with the faint hope that I might get some street shots there. Everyone was coming into work at this time, and the sun was low and hard, coming through the gaps in the buildings. I used the opposite of a normal street lens, which is usually the classic 35mm wide angle. Instead I used a 300mm telephoto, so perspective was compressed and the scene was quite narrow. I waited until people came into the shafts of sunlight, and spot metered only on the faces, rather than on the whole scene. As a result the images have intense contrast – I did very little to them other than to adjust the exposure and contrast slightly. I also ran the camera in burst mode at 10 frames per second.

Because of the huge impact of the shafts of light, images taken fractions of a second apart are quite different, even though they may feature the same people – such as the sequence with the blue mask later in the series. Anyway, I hope you like them.

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The Cape is very British in many aspects, most notably in its attitude to the seaside. There are very glamorous beaches near Cape Town city which are reminiscent of the Côte d’Azur, and then 5 miles away you have to pinch yourself to remember you are not at Margate. It’s the latter I hugely favour, of course.

I ended up with very little time to do any street or beach photography, which is in general much less focussed than birds in flight or seascapes, and consists of wandering around for hours waiting for something to happen. But people did come into the scene while I was shooting BIF or harbours, and on my penultimate day I spent a wonderful few hours before dinner at Fishhoek beach, which is one of the most traditional on the coast.

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I first started photographing birds in flight (BIF) in 2017 in Cape Town. I had previously been concentrating only on sea and riverscapes, and street photography. The word was that proficiency in BIF was hard, and expensive as it needed special lenses, great technique and high-speed cameras for any kind of success. I rapidly found out that this was extremely true.

Technology and my technique have improved massively since then, and this trip I returned to again photograph the mighty Sacred Ibis, an amazing bird, which congregates in significant numbers very close to our house in Noordhoek. While in pre-Covid times, I would often return from a photography session with no usable photographs at all, the situation has changed such that I now get literally thousands of them. Don’t worry, you don’t have to look at them all, but it has enabled me to focus in on the real magic of these very special creatures. I have written an extensive post on the improvements in cameras, lenses and technique over the last seven years here, and it’s worth a read if you want to understand how these shots were taken

As with Gannets, the appearance and aerodynamics of the Sacred Ibis are startlingly different between their flight mode (legs straight out)and their landing mode (legs down). The first half of the album shows their beautiful wings in flight. The second half shows the apparent utter disarray of their landing. What looks like chaos in the wing department is a actually very effective selection of flaps, ailerons and spoilers to slow and control the descent of a pretty large chunk of bird. You absolutely cannot see this display with the naked eye, so as with long exposure, the camera can enable you to see the otherwise unseeable.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon