The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.
Feedback Focus: Artistic + Technical
About This Image
Taking an idea from @canan and running with it - infrared and macro…
No macro lens will fit (yet) so standard 50mm with 26mm of extension tubes.
All manual focus and no flash yet (again need to get some adapters for this to work )
Manual focus - so you have Nooo time at all - best is burst mode and move in and out in the hope that something in the burst will be sharp enough!
Feedback Requested
Any comments, suggestions or further tricks, ideas, experiences would be helpful
Technical Details
Camera: SONY ILCE-5100
Lens: FE 50mm F1.8
Focal length: 50mm with 26mm Extension tube
Shutter speed: 1/200s
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 640
Full spectrum IR convert with 720nm filter
It looks beautiful and dreamy, especially given all the challenges you’ve listed. I’d increase contrast a little, but that’s totally my personal preference.
I like both infrared and Lensbaby, and one of my favorite quotes is now from Julia Margaret Cameron, who was criticized for her soft-focus images: “What is focus–& who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?”
I have about a week of experience with this, so it’s not like I know a lot. But what I’ve seen is that the hot spot gets very bad with f/22, but burning (as in dodging and burning) that area with a light touch (adjusting opacity and flow of the brush) as the last step in the processing deals with it.
An interesting experiment, Huw. It actually worked quite well. The shallow depth of field and the B&W create a nicely ethereal feel to the image. There are a lot of really cool macro lenses from after-market lens companies that are all manual and might suit this well, though hot spots could be a problems as I don’t know how well those lenses are documented in the infrared community.
Huw: This is flat out fantastic. You and @canan bringing infrared to macro has been terrific and expanding. I’ve never been able to get a single manual focus hand held shot with one attempt. The mere pressure on the shutter button is likely to trigger blur, especially at these macro distances so your burst technique is the way to go. The only thing I don’t like about the necessity of using the burst mode is the volume of images I have to cull through to pick a winner. Oh well, think if we were still shooting film ($$$$) ! >=))>
Another couple of plays - really need to control the burnt out whites and not sure about how far to push the sharpening - suspect these have gone too far - but they look great at 100% with reasonable viewing distance
I like what the infrared look does for this image. Very well done. I don’t have a camera that is converted to infrared but I sure like what you and @canan accomplished using it for macro. Looking forward to seeing more.
) ! >=))>
