Manual or TTL flash for macro?

Green metallic bee
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Having switched from a manual to a TTL flash for my bug macro work, I do really appreciate the consistency it gives me between shots. I very rarely have to seriously adjust the exposure in post -- or if I do, it's the same adjustment across a series.

Having 2nd curtain sync is great, too. I've definitely gotten shots with visible motion blur that are usable, even pretty good, but where I can tell that I would have junked it using 1st curtain sync. The difference is in 1st curtain sync, the flash makes the exposure and then any motion gets exposed while the shutter is still open, so the blur is actually leading the motion; in 2nd curtain sync, the motion is exposed before the flash fires, so any blur is trailing the motion, like our brains expect. The image with this post is a good example: I've gotten many photos of sweat bees with leading blur that would have looked fine with trailing blur.

TTL flashes can be used as manual flashes, are generally built better, and generally have a better manufacturer's warranty if you get them new. The only real downside is the major price difference, which can be really significant when you're comparing a $40 Yongnuo with a $280 Canon. So the benefits are real and noticeable, but whether they're worth paying $240 for is definitely going to be an individual call.

But my real point here is that there are two things I've noticed lately that may not be obvious to someone considering what kind of flash to buy for shooting insects.

The first is that TTLs fire a pre-flash, which they use to gauge how much light to put out, and then the camera opens the shutter and fires the actual flash pulse. This happens nearly instantly. But some insects, like smaller flies, are actually so fast that they can be startled by the pre-flash and fly away before the actual flash fires -- especially if you're shooting with 2nd curtain sync, where there's an extra 1/250th of a second to react in. Manual flash doesn't have this problem.

The other gotcha is that you can't always tell if your flash is positioned efficiently. On a manual flash, it's obvious if the flash gets out of position, because you start underexposing; if you don't change the setting, it's not going to change itself just because the sensor wants more light. But that's exactly what a TTL flash does.

You might be thinking, "and that's why I want one", but it's not. You want TTL to automatically deal with changes in scene: changes in focal distance as you back away just a bit, changes in the leaves around the subject as they blow in and out of frame, changes in composition as you follow an ant across a white flower, etc. But you want to know the flash is shooting roughly where you want it, somewhere around 1/32nd to 1/8th power, to take advantage of the fastest flash pulse you can. When you start shooting at 1/4, 1/2, full power because you're only catching the subject with the dimmer edge of the flash beam, the exposure is basically slowing down and you start recording a lot more movement. Motion blur becomes very noticeable. On top of that, the flash takes longer to recycle, and it obviously drains the batteries faster.

I get around this by checking every now and then by switching over to manual to see what power level I'm basically firing at. If you've been shooting with a TTL speedlight and you've found some of your bug shots are inexplicably blurry from time to time, this might be the problem.

Neither of those two things are deal breakers for me. In fact, I doubt they'd have affected my decision to get a TTL flash at all if I'd known, since I didn't get it just for insects. They do affect how I use the 430EX II though, so if you're thinking about what flash to get for this kind of photography, consider this an FYI.

Spyder 3 Express with laptop + external monitor

I'm using a Spyder 3 Express from Datacolor for my monitor calibration. I'll probably upgrade the software to Color Eyes when I have some more cash, but for right now the basic software that comes with the puck is good enough. I want accurate color, but I don't think anything I'm doing is that color critical, so "good enough" is good enough.

One problem I ran into was getting it to calibrate the right display. I have a Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (awesome display, by the way), attached to a Vostro 1500 laptop. It's not my ideal workstation computer, but it works pretty well, so like better calibration software, upgrading it isn't my highest priority right now. But the Spyder 3 Express, with the bundled software, only wants to measure the primary display, which it wrongly believes to be the laptop screen instead of the external. No amount of fiddling with display properties would convince it otherwise, but I did figure out how to do it.

Go into Power Options, and change the setting for when the laptop's lid is shut from "Sleep" or whatever it is to "Do Nothing". Then close the laptop, and open the Spyder 3 software -- you only have one display now, so it picks the monitor. Easy as that.

Lightroom keywords for taxa

I hate keywording.  I really do.  I like post-processing in general but sitting down and coming up with all the possible ways someone might be searching for an image is tedious.  Especially as a nature photographer, since there are so many different things about an animal that might be potentially interesting to someone.

Take the name of the animal, like this Andrena bee. Someone may need a photo to actually represent the genus Andrena. Or they might just be looking for any mining bee -- in that case, are they looking for the term "mining bee", or for the family Andrenidae? Or even the sub-family Andreninae? What if they're looking for any bee? Any hymenopteran? Any insect?

I hate having to put all those in, and honestly I often half-ass it and settle for "bee, andrena, insect". That's probably fine, especially if it's a photo I'm just putting up on Flickr, but I don't like leaving those other possibilities off the table just because I'm bored of typing in family and order names, and want to get to the next photo.

Lightroom has a way to automate this, through the creative use of nested keywords and synonyms.  A keyword can contain other keywords: Let's say you have a tree that looks like this:

food
        meat
        plant
                fruit
                vegetable
                grain
        dairy

The benefit of building this structure is that when you export an image with a keyword nested inside another, Lightroom walks up the keyword tree and adds every root keyword it finds.  So tagging a photo of an apple as "fruit" would also automatically tag it as "plant" and "food".  The tree is one-way: tagging it as "plant" does not add "fruit", "vegetable", or "grain".

Synonyms are related to trees.  Instead of an up-and-down structure, it's side-by-side.  So you could add the synonyms "veggie" and "greens" to "vegetable", and they would all be added to any image tagged with "vegetable".

 Essentially what I've started doing is to build a taxonomic tree of nested keywords, all starting under "animal".  Inside "animal" is the keyword "arthropod", which contains "hexapod", and then "insect", and "Hymenoptera".  I've started building a structure below this of all the kinds of bees I might conceivably find -- I've only got it flesh out to about the tribe level so far, and in some places not much below the family, but here's what the hymenopteran part of the tree looks like when I export it as a text file:

({brackets} show synonyms of the keyword they're inside, so "hymentopteran" is a synonym of "Hymenoptera".)


Hymenoptera      
    hymenopteran}                      
    Aculeata                              
        bee                  
            {anthophila}
            {apidae}
            {apiformes}
            {apoidea}
            Andrenidae
                {andrenid bee}
                {solitary bee}
                {burrowing bee}
                {ground-nesting bee}
                {miner bee}
                {mining bee}
                Andreninae
                    Andrena
            Apidae
                Apinae
                    Anthrophorini
                        {anthrophorine bee}
                    Apini
                        {honey bee}
                        Apis
                            Apis mellifera
                    Bombini
                                       {bumble bee}
                    Centridini
                    Emphorini
                    Eucerini
                        {long-horned bee}
                    Euglossini
                        {orchid bee}
                    Exomalopsini
                    Melectini
                Nomadinae
                    {cuckoo bee}
                Xylocopinae
                    {carpenter bee}
                    Ceratina
                        {small carpenter bee}
                        Calloceratina
                            Calloceratina cobaltina
                        Ceratinula
                            Ceratinula arizonensis
                            Ceratinula cockerelli
                        Zadontomerus
                            Zadontomerus calcarata
                            Zadontomerus dupla
                            Zadontomerus strenua
                    Xylocopa
                        Xylocopa virginica
                            {Eastern carpenter bee}
            Halictidae
                {halictid}
                {halictid bee}
                {sweat bee}
                Halictinae
                    Augochlorini
                        Augochlora
                        Augochlorella
                        Augochloropsis
                    Halictini
                        Agapostemon
                            {green metallic bee}
                            {green sweat bee}
                            {green}
                            {metallic}
                            Agapostemon virescens
                        Halictus
                        Lasioglossum
                        Mexalictus
                        Sphecodes


For myself, I've chosen to use Latin names as the base keywords, with common names and outdated scientific names as synonyms.  Where a common name can apply to more than one species, I put it as high up on the tree as I can.  In some cases, like for Agapostemon (a bright green bee with a reflective thorax), I added certain adjectives that will be relevant to any photo I ever take of one as synonyms.

So, I tag the image above as "Andrena".  When I export it, Lightroom automatically adds all the root keywords and synonyms it finds.  It ends up tagged as "Aculeata; Andrena; Andrenidae; Andreninae; Hexapoda; Hymenoptera; andrenid bee; animal; anthophila; apidae; apiformes; apoidea; arthropod; bee; burrowing bee; groundnesting bee; hexapod; hymenopteran; insect; miner bee; solitary bee;" -- all from one single tag.

I'm also fleshing out structures for other groups of animals that I frequently shoot, and will do the same for behaviors later.  All my spiders are auto-tagged "predator" now, for example.  It's an up-front investment in time, but great for days like today, where it's raining and I'm waiting on FedEx to bring me my replacement flash.  And I'll be perfectly honest: I love automating repetitive tasks, I love taxonomy and phylogeny, and I love directional trees (graph theory is my favorite kind of math).  It's a total confluence of geekery, that, for once, is actually somewhat productive.

Back-button Autofocus

If you're shooting with a camera that supports it, look into using back-button autofocus, which separates the autofocus system from the shutter button.  Then, the shutter button starts and locks the light meter, and the AF button, pressed with your thumb, starts the autofocus magic. 

Mid-range and pro Canon DSLRs will often have a dedicated button for this ("AF-ON"); the Rebels can use the AE-Lock ("*") button for it.  They all have a custom function that can let you select, basically, which of all these buttons do what -- there are actually several ways to map different functions to these buttons besides the one I'm talking about here, one of which might be even more perfect for your work style.  I can't speak to Nikons from personal experience but I know they have this ability, and I assume other brands do as well -- my EOS A2 can do this, so it's not a new idea.

It takes a little bit of effort to retrain your thumb and forefinger, but not much.  And for a lot of photographers, it's worth it.  If you think about it, having one button control the focus, the light meter, and the shutter all at the same time doesn't make a lot of sense to begin with.  A lot of times, the subject of your image is going to need be in focus and exposed properly, sure -- but that's no harder with back-button AF, whereas photos where that's not the case are going to be much harder to manage without it.

Imagine trying to shoot a person against a bright, colorful sunset with fluffy clouds, and mackerel sky.  You're visualizing a mid-distance portrait with her silhouetted against the background, so you switch over to partial metering, because you don't want the light meter to find some ugly middle ground by looking at everything: this scene is about contrast and color.   So in aperture-priority mode* for shallow DoF, you meter off of the sky to bring her exposure down by two stops, full black, and AE-Lock it.  Then you autofocus on the person, but the light meter wakes up again: your shutter speed drops to bring her exposure up higher than you want, the sky gets overexposed, and everything is either noisy or blown out.  With back-button AF focus, you could have held the exposure with the shutter button, then focused with your thumb, without the light meter knowing or caring.

*Shooting in manual mode would also avoid this sort of problem, except of course that the light is fading fast in this hypothetical situation, and somebody's got to keep an eye on the light meter, whether it's you or the camera.

Another situation where this comes in useful is when you're shooting in low but shifting light, where the AF drive has to work hard to find its subject in the first place.  Imagine shooting a street corner on a cloudy day, with the street signs in focus and readable, and moving cars and pedestrians around it.  You get the street sign in focus easily enough, but clicking the shutter button will send the AF hunting back and forth for whatever it thinks you want.

Sure, you can switch the lens AF off, but that's is a workaround, and it's easy enough to miss a shot because you forgot to switch it back on again.  Back-button AF means you don't have to think about working around slightly complicated, everyday focus/metering issues like this because they just don't come up.  It's no harder than having the shutter button do all the work, and in many cases it's just a lot easier.

Keeping photos on Flickr safe

I noticed something a little odd while poking around in my Flickr settings. The recommended setting for "Who can download your stuff" is "anyone". Personally, I don't think is wise. Promoting this sort of image sharing is basically promoting image theft, since any Corporate Joe Schmoe can just click the 'download this image' link without even having a Flickr account. I've read a few discussions on the Flickr boards about it, and people say things like "well, what do you think photo sharing means", and "people like to let others download their pictures". That's fine for some people, but I'd argue that the majority of Flickr users aren't aware of just how much commercial image theft goes on -- it's an image sharing site, but the default settings turn it into a file sharing site.

I doubt many people would be offended by some random web surfer using their images as a wallpaper or screensaver, but that's really not what I'm concerned about. It's not uncommon to hear of people finding their work used, without permission, for commercial purposes -- _rebekka, one of Flickr's big success stories, famously found her photos for sale on microstock sites, including some self-portraits, as one example. Many other artists have seen their work used in magazines, newspapers, web sites, and other media without their knowledge or permission; their are too many 'copyright infringement', 'stolen images', and related groups and tags on Flickr to link to just one. Not only is this a problem for the individual users who find their work misused in this way, it's a problem for the photo industry at large, since even an dirt cheap royalty-free download on a microstock site is more expensive than a free download from Flickr. Those of us who rely on our photography as a source of income, even if it's not a very large portion, are competing with thousands of talented artists who don't realize it and won't see credit or compensation for their work.

It's basically impossible to avoid this if you're putting images online. If it can be seen in a browser, it can be downloaded and used inappropriately. But there are basic things you can do on Flickr to avoid it. Go to your privacy settings and review everything there. Each of these settings can generally be set to allow access to 'anyone', 'any Flickr user', 'contacts', 'friends and family', or 'only you'; which is safest for you would depend on how you want to share your images, and how you organize your contacts. Personally, any contact marked 'friend' or 'family' is someone I know and trust, and implicitly grant permission to use an image privately, but I want the general public to be able to see my work, so my privacy settings reflect this.

Under Global settings, there are three settings that allow access to the original URL of the image -- not the web page where the photo is displayed, which looks like 'http://www.flickr.com/photos/mehampson/3634916839/', but the address of the actual JPG, which begins something like 'http://farm3.static.flickr.com' and ends in '.jpg'. This is all that's needed to download an image from Flickr.

Who can download your stuff: Flickr can place a transparent GIF over your image to hinder (though not completely prevent) downloading your images, and this setting controls who can view your images without it. It also controls who can see the 'all sizes' button, which allows views to choose larger or smaller images. The default is 'anyone', which as I said above, I think is a bad idea. I set mine to 'only you', though I wouldn't have a problem sending someone I know a full-sized JPG.

Who can share your photos or video and Who can blog your stuff: I set these to 'friends or family', since there is a roundabout way of getting the original image's URL through these options.

Under Defaults for new uploads, there is another setting to think about.

Set a default license: If you don't mind people downloading your work, you should consider using a Creative Commons license, which allows you to keep your copyright while still letting others use your work in various ways, or you can put your images directly into the public domain.

Outside of Flickr, there are other things you can do. Some people watermark their images; I don't do this myself, since I haven't seen many that are both hard to clone or crop out of an image and minimally disruptive to the composition. I did see one the other day that I thought looked pretty classy, so I'm considering it, but we'll see.

Another thing I do is to restrict the size of my uploads. I no longer upload anything larger than 1280 pixels on the long edge; I've seen other people restrict it to 800 pixels. This isn't foolproof either, since there are some pretty amazing upscaling techniques out there, but I don't see any reason to offer a full 10 MP image. (I do upload full resolution images to Smugmug though, since I sell prints there, and restrict the largest viewable size.)

I don't have a problem with people choosing a CC license or public domain, by the way. I don't choose it for my own work, but I totally respect the choice of artists who do -- my beef is with the exploitation of artists' copyrighted work, not with artists who grant permission for their work to be used broadly. Flickr isn't the only site where images can be stolen, and it's not to blame for the practice -- the people who actually download and use images marked 'All rights reserved' are. I just wish Flickr made it a little harder for them to do it by default.

Some backbone

Some backbone
Originally uploaded by mehampson

One small problem I have with studio macros like this is the lack of a good background. My blue-grey wall provides pretty boring bokeh... So while taking some shots of this capelin spine, I came across a new technique that shows great promise for providing interesting, well-blurred backgrounds: I took a large book with a good cover illustration, placed it behind the subject, and, magically, interesting bokeh.

Cheating perhaps. But much better than the wall.