Today, there are many different ways of producing HDR photographs on the Mac, the most common of which was described in my Beginners Guide to HDR, and this review covers four of the applications available to us. I will be looking at Photomatix Pro, HDR PhotoStudio, Hydra and the free option HDRtist. To help you make your own mind up, the source photos used in this review are available to download here, and you can use them in the demos linked at the end of this page. I will be testing all four applications at aligning and merging first and then tone-mapping second, making the image usable as a JPEG on the dynamic range a monitor can display. I will be assuming you’ve read my beginner’s guide and will be using terminology described there, but if you haven’t, don’t worry too much about it. Apologies for both the length and the lack of detail. I wish I could have made it shorter and I also wish I could have had the time to make it much, much longer. Comment below if you agree or disagree and if you like this sort of thing, follow me on Twitter.

Boats at Bowling - Widescreen

The Software

Photomatix Pro is the software I used for my tutorial and it’s probably the most common solution in use. It comes as both a stand-alone application and as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop.

HDR PhotoStudio has been available to Windows users for a while but is a newcomer to the Mac. While it’s not got a Photoshop plugin, it does have a BEF exporter Photoshop plugin, so you can do the aligning and merging in Photoshop if you prefer.

Hydra is a stand-alone application only and is exclusively available on the Mac. It’s got neither a plug-in nor an exporter and as such can only rely on it’s own alignment system, which as you’ll see later is quite a drawback.

HDRtist is the free option. It’s got nothing apart from a slider. No, really. When you want to align images, it installs an open-source alignment binary, aligns the images and presents you with one slider control. One nice thing is that if you run it outside the Applications folder, it asks you if you want to move it there. Very nice, and yes please.

Move to Applications?

Right, let’s get started. I’ve selected two photographs with interesting areas of light and dark, taken without a tripod as JPEGs at three exposures, 2ev apart. I’m not using Raw photos this time as it would just add to the processing time and would show off the workflow more than the software. The aim of this review is not to show off my technical strengths or weaknesses, but rather to show how the software handles common issues you will come across.

Aligning and merging

All four applications accept multiple exposures and merge them together, aligning them with varying degrees of success. When you take bracketed photos without the use of a tripod, you need the software to cover up the unavoidable slight movements. The next four images are all 1:1 pixel crops of an aligned and rushed through image to give an impression of the alignment and should not be taken as quality of rendering.

Photomatix Pro

The choices offered for aligning images when you import them in Photomatix Pro are excellent. They work very well and are the best of this bunch of applications. To make them even better, you have the option of aligning the exposures in Photoshop as part of its “Merge to HDR…” automation as mentioned above.

Photomatix Pro 1:1 crop

Photomatix Generate HDR - Options

HDR PhotoStudio

Alignment options are scarce, but it seems to do fine.

HDR Photostudio 1:1 crop

Hydra

Ugh. The automatic option is lousy and even when doing it by hand (using matching points in a rather unintuitive interface) you still get overlap. Worst of the lot. They’d be better off adopting the system used by HDRtist, in my opinion.

Hydra 1:1 crop

Hydra's Align options

HDRtist

An open-source application called “Align_Image_Stack” is installed when you click the Align option. Like HDR Photostudio above, this just works.

HDRtist 1:1 crop

Go ahead, click my button.

Tone Mapping

Tone Mapping is the stage that turns the HDR image into a visible LCD-ranged image. It’s the part that you need to be most careful with, as you’ll know from my tutorial. The HDR images below are what comes out of the software and would also look much better finished off in photoshop (cropping, cleaning, cloning, etc.) but you can do all that yourselves once you’ve played with your choice of software. No attempt has been made to try to render the images with the same settings; what I’ve done is fiddle with the settings to get an output that works as quickly as possible. With Hydra, this was difficult and the resulting output will require a lot of post-processing. With HDRtist, I just whacked the single slider up to eleven and hit save.

Photomatix Pro

The range of choices are very easy to get to grips with. I usually have Luminosity, Microcontrast and Smoothing set fairly high and try to keep Strength and Saturation low, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

Landscape from Photomatix

Photomatix screen

Settings used above

HDR PhotoStudio

If you decide to use HDR Photostudio, I woiuld definitely take some time to learn the Veiling Glare and the Brightness/Contrast controls as that’s where the magic happens. Not as easy to get to grips with as Photomatix, but rewarding nonetheless. I miss the white and black point settings, but again, that’s something I can finish in Photoshop or Acorn if needed.

Landscape from HDR Photostudio

HDR Photostudio: Settings/tools on the left

Hydra

Confusing and not very rewarding. I can’t get up the energy to go into too much detail, but I’ll try. There are three basic Tone Mapping choices: Compression, Local Adaptation and Perceptive. None of them gives a good result.

Landscape from Hydra

Hydra working screen

HDRtist

One slider. Fast Preview. Lesson over.

Landscape from HDRtist

No frills, slider on bottom left.

Conclusion

If you’re just playing around casually, HDRtist is hard to beat for the price. Sure, it is very variable, but if you shoot for it and get lucky, it’s great. However, we can’t consider it a real contender as it cannot produce consistent results from variable sources. Next up, Hydra offers nothing of note and should be avoided until it gets some chops. Yes, it is a very good Mac citizen, with 64-bit compatibility, a great OSX interface and a very good Mac feel, and yes, it’s harsh to say this, but if it can’t even align pictures that well, it’s never going to be a go-to application. This leaves us a choice between Photomatix Pro and HDR PhotoStudio as the software to get, and depending on your needs, either will do. I’m going to declare Photomatix Pro as the winner, especially for of the Photoshop Plugin, but HDR PhotoStudio may suit you and your photography style better. Try both out as demos and make your own mind up as I can’t be sure my familiarity with Photomatix Pro isn’t biasing the result. HDR Photostudio has some nice touches and some amazing colour controls, for instance check out their comprehensive tutorials for stuff I may have missed, and I’m going to keep exploring it, so come back for updates and a long-term test.

Don’t take my word on any of this when you can download demos here:

• Photomatix Pro
• HDR PhotoStudio
• Hydra
• HDRtist

Yes, even give Hydra a try as I may have missed the “make it good” button in my eagerness to slag it off unnecessarily.

Oh, and before I forget, here are zip files containing the crappy hand-held photos used in the tests above. Each 9MB ZIP contains three photos at +/-2ev.

• landscape
• bowlingboats

Please comment and show me what you’ve done. If you’re lucky, I may even chuck a quick TrueHDR iPhone App review in the comments later.

In recent years, it’s safe to say everything has been on the up for amateur photographers like myself. Digital photography has removed the waiting and the chemicals from the workflow, meaning everyone who has a digital camera can see instantly what their pictures look like. The adage that every photographer has a few thousand crap photos to take before they take a good one is dealt with so much sooner now. This, coupled with sites like Flickr, DeviantArt and to some degree Facebook, means amateurs like myself can get their pictures seen by more people than ever before. This leads to being approached for commercial usage and this is where the Professionals have got themselves into apoplexy.

A rank amateur, raining on your parade. ©2008, Stuart Dallas Photography

After decades of hubris, professional photographers are now feeling threatened by the amateurs. Not in terms of skill, training, experience or even equipment but in the only area they can be beaten by a rank amateur and that’s price. You see this reported in the NYT and on blogs everywhere and the feeling is that the amateurs need to stop fuelling the race to the bottom, because the middleman is an evil party making money from your naïveté. We need to help the professionals and start competing with them on their terms, at their prices, otherwise we’re hurting a profession that really needs our support right now.

Well, I’m going to be the one to call bullshit on this one. I still respect professionals, even though they’ve collectively sneered at us amateurs over the years, but if you’re operating at a skill level that can be equalled by a lucky granny with a point-and-shoot, maybe you need to re-evaluate your career. If you’re suffering in this economy, it’s not the amateur’s fault; it’s the economy, stupid.

I don’t know how to save your career, but to be honest, that’s not my job. One thing I can assume is that it’d help if you stopped being complacent. I can tell you that blaming it on amateurs isn’t going to help. You’ve been unkind to us in the past and we’ve been gracious and accepting of your superiority, but to land this one on our doorstep is a bit much.

This is not supposed to offend professionals, especially those I consider personal friends, but come on, if you’ve complained about being undercut by an amateur, give us a break; that was you at one point.

What’s your opinion? Please share it in the comments below or tell me on Twitter.

Update 2010-02-10: The BBC once again prove their decency. They have clarified that the images and text were sent in by a viewer and were taken on good faith, an unfortunately easy thing to do these days and they’ve decided to honour my requests. All in all, I’m impressed with their reaction as they could have swatted me aside like a fly as I’m small-fry compared to their might, but they didn’t. So, go join the Facebook Save BBC 6Music group. Why couldn’t this happen with someone I disliked?

Original article follows:

I love the BBC, I really do. I think the licence fee is a worthy and valid charge as it distances the programming from commercial concerns, allowing for such wonderful programmes as Planet Earth and Life. However, I don’t like it when the BBC wastes portions of their funds on such useless things as covering fines for stupidity and … um, paying me.

Used for review purposes. Besides, it's mostly mine!

Yes, that’s my Munchy Box photo and even the text has been wrenched from the pages of this very blog. I know Radio 6 is my favourite radio station, but that doesn’t excuse their nicking two of my photos and plagiarising my bloody blog, does it.

The irony of this was that I’d recently commented on the Technical Fault blog shortly after the BBC used one of his photos by mistake. The difference is that they’ve not only lifted two photos, but they’ve also copied a part of the text verbatim. This isn’t accidental plagiarism, this is deliberate.

Now, when the Daily Record made the same mistake, reprinting the exact same photo, I was able to get their picture desk to cough up.

Used for review purposes, again. © David Boylan

Hopefully, the BBC will do the right thing. However, what’s astounding is that companies like the BBC and the Daily Record can be so aggressively anti-copyright infringement with one hand and so lax in their application of the rights of others. It’s not the first time that a large publishing company has misappropriated someone else’s copyright, and I doubt it will be the last, but seriously, the BBC should know better. It’s not like they don’t know about this stuff, as I remember them phoning me, asking if one of my photos could be used for their Big Picture section, and, because it was the BBC, I was more than willing to provide them with any info they wanted. It’s an honour and a privilege when anyone of the photos you submit is used in their pictorials, and that’s what makes it hard when they run roughshod over your rights. Would I have allowed them to reproduce these photos if they’d have asked? That’s a different question, but they didn’t ask. I’ve emailed them, and the sports metaphor is now in their court. I’ll keep you updated.

One thing that we amateur photographers don’t know is how much to invoice for misuse. What’s realistic and what’s just taking the piss? When will they pay and when will they say “sue us then”? The Daily Record paid £150 for their unauthorised use, but that’s only after I haggled them up from the £75 they offered.

Update 2010-02-01: The BBC have been in touch to say they’re looking into it and the page has been pulled.

For the last 136 days, I’ve posted an iPhone photo on the internet just about every day. Where I’ve missed the occasional day, I’ll post its photo the day after, but more often than not, I take a photo and publish it to Flickr on that day. It started out as an experiment, posting a photo to Twitter using twitpic, but it soon became clear that this was not an ideal solution whereby I switched to Darkslide, as described here. At first, I didn’t make too much of a song and dance about it as I didn’t know how many days I would last before giving up.

What the iPhone 3G can do with enough light

What I have learned over the last four and a bit months is that the discipline needed is rather hard at the beginning, but unsurprisingly gets easier as you do it more. However, even now I sometimes forget and have to start looking for something to photograph instead of just finding something.

Danger on flaking paint

Also, I very quickly learned the limitations of the iPhone 3G’s camera. It’s noisy in low-light, it’s fixed-focus and it’s basically not very good. The new iPhone 3GS has a significantly better camera that has a lens that can focus and is much better at managing differing light levels, something else the 3G suffers from being bad at. However, with practice and trial-and-error, you can get some decent photos with it.

Light fitting on the stairs to my work

The iPhone’s camera also has a rather slow scan, which can make action shots nigh-on impossible, but this can make for some intriguing effects of you move the camera while taking photographs. It takes a little getting used to the timing, but is an entertaining distraction.

Swinging camera

When there is a certain amount of light, the photo quality improves dramatically and the camera almost becomes a proper camera, albeit a mere 2 megapixel one. A friend of mine in Japan takes iPhone photos on a regular basis and some of his come out remarkably clearly. The reason for this is that there is apparently a better quality of light in Tokyo than there is in Glasgow. However, now that summer is threatening to give us proper light, we northern iPhone users may get some decent photos from our crappy cameras.

Blue sky, a statue and a bird.

So, as the saying goes, the crappy camera in your pocket takes better pictures than the fancy camera you left at home. Why not try taking a photo a day with whatever camera phone you’ve got. Post it to Twitter and show us what you can do.

A day dolphin spotting at Fortrose

This article will demonstrate one way of posting photos to Twitter from an iPhone that allows us much more control than the usual ways, with a robust and reliable back-end provided by Yahoo’s legendary infrastructure. The key to the whole exercise is Darkslide, an iPhone Flickr client created by the man behind the brilliant FlickrExport.

The apps I use

Every day, I take a photo with my iPhone (The camera isn’t the best on a phone by a long shot, but it’s the camera I always have with me) and post that picture to Twitter. I started out doing this with what seemed like an ideal solution, twitpic, as it’s pretty much available in any iPhone client and as such has a few nice little features, like a picture icon appearing in twitpic posts in Tweetie, my Twitter client of choice.

Twitpic - as seen in Tweetie

However, and you’d guessed there would be a however as this article is about Darkslide, Twitpic has suffered from reliability issues and has, in some cases returned different pictures to the ones you upload. In fact, one picture tweeted by Stephen Fry has been known to take the service down. What would be better in this case would be a more robust image hosting service with a history, like Flickr. That’s where Darkslide comes in.

My Photos

Darkslide is an iPhone application (available in both free-with-ads and paid ad-free versions) that plugs straight into the Flickr API. It’s got loads of decent features, like your contacts’ streams, photos near you, earches, etc., and does the job really well. So, before we go any further, log into your Flickr account in Safari on your iPhone, install Darkslide and set it up. If you plan to use a separate Flickr account for Darkslide, set it up and login on the iPhone before launching it. When you first launch Darkslide, it’ll ask you to approve it in Flickr. This is a simple step as long as you already logged into Flickr on your iPhone. Once this is done, it’s time to choose which Twitter client you want to use by going to More and selecting Settings. Twitterific, Tweetie and Twitterfon are supported as is the Twitter website using Safari. Once this is done, we can finally post a photo to Twitter.

More

Settings

First, take a photo using the camera. This can be done in Darkslide itself in the Upload section or using the iPhone’s Camera app. I prefer using Camera as Darkslide doesn’t let you look at the picture as well as the standard Photos app does. If you use one of those photo enhancement apps, I don’t, then you can do that at this point, before Darkslide gets its hands on it in. Launch Darkslide and select Upload at the bottom. This will give you the choice between taking a photo and using one we’ve already taken. Choose the picture using the Camera Roll as usual.

Upload

Camera Roll

Edit the title and description here, and set the location to your current location if you’re near where you took the photo. If you’re not at the exact spot, it’s still a good idea to use the current location of you’re fairly close as when edit the map in Flickr later, it’s easier if you start off near the photo location instead of having to locate the area from scratch.

Details

More details

Once you’ve filled in everything you want, remembering you can always edit it later in Flickr itself, you upload the photo by clicking the share icon in the top right. This then uploads the picture, giving you a progress bar across the bottom.

Begin Upload

In Progress

Once the picture is uploaded, it gives you the option of opening it in Flickr or posting it to Twitter. If you want to make a few more changes here before posting it, click on Open Flickr and change what’s needed; you can always post to Twitter from the Darkslide My Photos library as I explain later.

Upload Complete

Once you click on Post to Twitter, it launches your Twitter app of choice with a bit.ly link to your Flickr page. I presume that, once Flickr have their URL shortening system up and running, it’ll use that, but that’s a question you can ask @darkslideapp on Twitter, if you feel so inclined. Anyway, write some words here and click Send.

Post to Twitter

That’s it, you’ve now posted a Flickr photo instead of a Twitpic. You get all the advantages of Flickr, like the view count, the maps, your comments etc., and none of the flakiness of Twitpic.

As seen in Tweetie

If you want to post a photo that’s already in your Flickr stream, go to My Photos in Darkslide and touch the picture. These are the two view options: Rows and Thumbnails, selectable in the Settings, of course.

Thumbnails view

Rows view

Selecting a picture brings up this screen.

Picture info

Clicking the Share icon in the top right gives you the choice to Post to Twitter, and selecting that will open your Twitter client, as described above, ready to post your photo.

Share photo

My one complaint about Darkslide, and it’s pretty trivial as you’ll see, is that it doesn’t open Flickr in the amazing Flickr Mobile by default, even though you’re 100% guaranteed to be on an iPhone. You need to go to Flickr and scroll to the bottom of the site and tell Flickr to always redirect by clicking on the link.

Click the link at the bottom

These are what the two different Flickr sites look like. Regular and Mobile:

Regular Flickr site

Flickr Mobile

This is what a contact’s page looks like in Darkslide:

Contact's photos

All in all, Darkslide is pretty near perfect on the iPhone. Give it a go and tell me what you think. If all else fails, you can look at my crappy daily iPhone pictures, my less crappy pictures or follow me on Twitter.

So, we went for a walk and I took a couple of pics.

First Frost

I think the winter will be much easier to photograph with my newly-learned HDR skills.

Frosty Lock

This horse even had the decency to stand still for the three exposures necessary for the HDR process.

Cold Horse

Anyway, that’s enough self-indulgent Flickr pimping …

I’m an avid photographer. I take a lot of pictures, especially when I’m learning new techniques or have some new equipment to master. This means I take a large number of photos in public places and when on holiday I always seem to have a camera around my neck.

A few years ago, this would have been seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour and I would have been treated as a welcome visitor, bringing in tourist cashy-money. The iconic image of the American Tourist is one of a behawaiianshirted loud man in shorts with an SLR fitted with a 200mm lens round his neck. The iconic image of a Japanese Tourist is that of a polite suited man looking at the world through the lens of a compact camera. Cameras are tourism. Even us Brits when taking our local money to a different town will usually be armed with some sort of digital camera, and let’s not forget we all have camera phones now.

A week after the 2005 London Bombings, I was in London on a holiday we’d booked weeks before. We didn’t consider it a risk or any of that stuff, but we didn’t realise that, as our hotel was at Euston Station, we would be in and around the area it all happened. Walking round Kings Cross and Euston with a camera and I was stopped several times by the police, asking me if I was there the previous week and if I’d taken any pictures. They were all handing out leaflets like this:

Poster shown around King's Cross, London, immediately after 7/7

The Police were actively seeking the assistance of the public, and quite rightly as anything that can be used to catch people responsible for terror attacks on civilians should be used – as long as it doesn’t interfere basic with human rights, of course. “Did you take any pictures?” was the question I was asked. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be of any help, but tried as best I could to document the atmosphere around that area the week after the attack. I’ve not many posted the photos I took because they were of difficult subjects, like a group of police carrying flowers to a memorial, or of a woman carrying a placard with a list of the dead (almost identical to a BBC photo), or of the crowd gathered outside King’s Cross for the one minute of silence. They weren’t particularly good photos, either. The very first photograph I took on this holiday was actually of the first policeman to ask me if I’d taken any photos; I answered I hadn’t but that I’d like to take his photo. He consented and I took this photo:

Policeman at Euston

Yes, later on on the holiday, I did take photos of ducks on ponds and stuff, as you’re supposed to, but that first day started with my pretending to be a rather poor amateurish photo journalist.

Today, that is different. Abraham Zapruder would be considered a terrorist suspect, John Filo would be considered a terrorist suspect and I would be considered a terrorist suspect, because today, if you take photos of the police, of government buildings or of the many closed-circuit cameras dotted around our British cities, you can be stopped by police, searched and be asked to delete your photos or even be detained for several hours, all of this under the auspices of the Terror Act 2000.

It’s difficult to know how to deal with this, as it’s not like you can argue with the Terror Act without sounding like a dick, and it’s not like you can reason with a pissed-off bobby with over-reaching powers. Being in the right does you no good if you get your camera accidentally broken with no recourse. All we can do is blog about it, which feels hollow and weak, but when all that’s left, expect to see a lot of it.

In the mean time, here are some photos of coppers doing their job, seven days after the bombing, and not hassling photographers.

Note closed road at rear of photo

Can you help?

Offerings

Patrolling

Alert

There is an excellent resource for UK photographers available here: A short guide to photographers rights in the UK.

Links:
• The Register – No snapping: Photographers get collars felt
• Daily Mail – Photographer held for five hours …
• Photographer arrested by Armed Police
• BBC – Innocent Photographer or Terrorist?

Well, you’ve done cheap Macro photos in the last post, so it’s time to try this madfangled HDR thingy you’ve seen everyone doing.

HDR (High Dynamic Range photography) is taking a photo at low, medium and high exposure and blending them together to get the best results. You know how when you get a decent holiday sunset photo and the beach is just a black smear under the gorgeous sky, or you see all the details of the sands with a white sky? That’s what HDR kicks to the kerb. Check out this slightly exaggerated example to see what I mean.

Sunset in Glassford

HDR tries to get around the limitations of traditional photography to present images in the same way as the eye sees them. When you look at a sunset, you see the sky and the beach equally as clearly.

You can see the HDR photos on my Flickr page. As you can see, the more I do them, the less outrageous they become.

What you’ll need is a camera that does bracketing (more about this in a minute), a computer and some HDR software. We know you’ve got a computer as this isn’t a dead-tree edition so we’ll get on with the software.

Software

This is dead easy as you have two options and they’re the same on both Mac and Windows PC:

1. Photomatix
2. Adobe Photoshop and the Photomatix plug-in

Yes, there does indeed seem to be a pattern there. So, go get the demo of Photomatix and get your camera ready.

Camera Settings

Bracketing is the art of taking a photo and having the camera then take a darker one and a lighter one just to make sure you get the right levels of light. I won’t go into too much detail on how to do this as every camera handles it differently so open your manual and look for bracketing in the index. It’ll be there, even on lesser cameras. Oh, if you have ever read any other articles on HDR, they all stress the importance of having a good tripod, but if you don’t have a tripod, don’t worry as this tutorial is to get you past the hurdle of taking your first HDR photo to see if you like it. We’ll not be spending any money on this technique until you’re happy it’s worth buying the software and getting a decent tripod.

Before you get too bored of all this dry text, here’s the picture I’ll be showing you how to produce:

Bowling Basin

Taking your first photos

Sunsets, skies and the like. This is what you should learn on. Getting a triptych of a decent sunset or two or should set you in good stead to discover the software, or if you want to take daytime shots, a decent half-cloudy sky should provide all the contrasty goodness you need.

-2ev, 0ev, +2ev

I took three photos, without a tripod, at +2ev, 0ev and -2ev, which is posh-speak for dark, normal and light. You’ve looked up how to do bracketing on your camera by now, right?

See how on the left, you can see amazing cloud patterns in the sky but they’re above an inky blackness, and how on the right, the clearly pictured trees are sitting beneath a flat white sky? Normally, those would get stickers stuck on them by Boots the Chemist for being craply taken, but, in conjunction with the well-exposed middle photo, they are precisely what we want.

Before I forget, you need to be shooting all three shots with the same aperture settings. Look up “Aperture Priority” in your camera manual. Remember lower numbers (like f2.8) allow quicker shutter speeds but only have a short range of focus (depth of field) whereas higher numbers (f22, for instance) allow much more to remain in focus, but require more light or slower shutter speeds. If light allows it, go for higher aperture numbers, especially if you are using a tripod.

Photomatix

Load up the demo version of Photomatix and click on the Generate HDR Image button and select your three photos like so and click OK.

Screen Grab

This will give you the settings as follows. The image alignment feature can make up for our spack-handedness not using a tripod. Click OK and wait for the progress bar to do its thing.

Screen Grab

Just click through the next screen by clicking Tone Mapping.

Screen Grab

On the next screen, you’ll get loads of options. If the photo looks too weird, click Default and start again. Settings can be saved and loaded.

Screen Grab

Play with the settings until you get something that looks good. There are no hard and fast rules, but here’s one setting I find makes a huge difference in picking out detail: the Microcontrast slider.

Screen Grab

Once you’re done, you may want to save your settings. However, you will want to press Process (cropped off the bottom of these grabs, I’m afraid) and watch the progress bar march relentlessly from left to right.

Save your picture and post it on the internet somewhere for all to see. Don’t forget, when you look back at your earlier HDR attempts, you may well cringe at how overdone they look. Don’t worry about that just yet. Play with the sliders to your heart’s content and get the outrageous manipulations out of your system.

Here are some examples of my HDR photos:

Boats at Bowling

Mercurius

Graveyard

Trees

Please take the time to comment.

Update: Photos now linked to Flickr. Go comment on them there.

Here’s a tutorial I wrote for the wristwatch forums I visit from time to time. Hopefully, you’ll be able to apply this technique to your photography. As you can see, I’m using a Canon EOS 400D but any DSLR should be able to do this.

Canon EOS400D

Normally, when you buy a camera, you get a fairly bog-standard average quality lens. This lens has one job and that’s to take in big and make it small enough to fit on the bit of the camera that captures the light. What macro lenses do is pretty much the opposite of that. So, what would happen if you turn the bog-standard lens round and held it to the camera?

This is what would happen:

Click for 1280px wide version

However, there must be a way to do better than manually holding the lens to the body, right? That’s where a quick trip to eBay for a Macro Reverser Ring, armed with £5 of paypal goodness comes in.

See that ring? It’s a reverser ring. It fits to the 58mm screw threads on the standard Canon lens and allows you to mount the lens backwards.

With this ‘new’ lens, you’re now armed to take some scary macro photos.

Please note, you’ll need to take a few photos to set the exposure time as the camera can’t do anything automatic. You’ve turned your fancy electronic lens into a lump of manual glass. Learn how to focus and zoom carefully.

I prefer at this point to computer control the camera, but you can get the same stability using the countdown timer.

Oh, and while I remember, that shot above is a reduced version of the shot I took. Here’s a 1:1 pixel crop. Scarily Macrotastic!

You can see more of my macro photos here in my Flickr Macro set, if you want.

Well, it looks like we’re a go. The main page has been running as a Blog for almost 9 years without a way of adding comments. This is us finally succumbing to the future.

To make this post seem like it’s worth something, here’s a picture of a tree.

HDRed and stuff. If you want to go look at more of my pics, go look at my Flickr page.