It's Raining Again, Time To Dig Out My Mini-Beach

Lovely weather here in Gosport, UK.... The rain is pouring down, but I need a photo for a Flickr Group assignment, so it's time to set up my macro beach set again!

This months Photo Assignment in the S5700 Flickr Group is Jewelry. To be honest I was pretty much stumped over what I should shoot, and how. I finally decided to have a go with the beach macro set that I played around with a couple of weeks ago.

Here's the beach macro set:

Now, for this jewellery shot, I wanted a real depth of field effect, so I used a large aperture (F3.5), and Super Macro Mode on my S5700 so I could get really close to the subject - about 2 cm away.

The problem was the composition - the camera wouldn't auto-focus on the ring because it was too far away from the AF Point, manual focus is too tricky on the S5700, and my camera can only focus on the centre in Macro Mode.

I ended up carefully focusing, locking it off with a half-press of the shutter button, then moving the camera on the tripod. I also bracketed the exposures, thinking of a HDR treatment to bring out the detail of the sand on the ring.

Here's what I came up with:

Mr Perins Ring? Taken With Fujifilm S5700, Super Macro, Aperture Priority, Processed To HDR With 3 Images +1 ev, 0ev, -1ev, 0ev: F3.5, 0.62 sec, ISO 64, Focal Length 6mm, Tripod

I merged to HDR in Photomatix, then used Photoshop to apply a Black and White adjustment layer, using the green filter default. I played with the levels a little, applied a sharpening pass on the ring (high-pass, masked), and ran Noise Ninja on the original, background layer.

So, if you if its raining and you can't go out and play with your camera - have a go at some "fake" macro sets!

Cheers, Rob.

Comments

[Andreas Øverland]

Man. Don't be afraid of the rain. Get a big umbrella, like one of those Golf-umbrellas. You can get lots of nice shots when the light is different from the hard sunlight. For example people scurrying along with their umbrellas, perhaps dragging their kids along. Or people who forgot their umbrella, covering themselves with newspapers and whatnot.

Rain is one of my favourite types of weather to go photograph in. But if it windy as well, then you need to be a bit careful. Still, a small plastic bag with a small opening for the lens is enough to protect the camera :)

[Rob_Nunn]

Ha! Great point Andreas - you've inspired me to go go out next time its chucking it down! ;-)

Cheers, Rob!