Gallery of Klaus Post: March 2006

Traditional Stock Macro

Today I have a few flower shots and some more traditional (uncleaned) stock macro shots.

Hacking an old Ring Flash

Today, my girlfriend and myself continued to play with her new macro lense. I got my Centon MR40 Ring flash out, I bought half a year ago for about $35. It's an old type TTL-lense, which doesn't really work to well on my 20D. It fires alright, but it fires at the lowest level, so it didn't really help.

My first solution was to set an exposure time at about half a second, and have an assistant (me or my girlfriend depending on who held the camera) fire the flash, using the "Test" button on the flash, when the other pressed the shutter release. It worked surprisingly well, except for a few ghosts from the long exposure time.

My second thought was if it would be possible to disable the TTL, and just have the flash fire everything it got. There are no controls on the flash whatsoever, so my only change was to remove the TTL comunication. I did this by covering all but the main flash trigger with tape. And it WORKED!

Wow - a ring flash for a tenth of the price of a Canon. Of course the camera has to be run completely in manual mode. But since macro are such a controlled environment, that isn't much of an issue anyway.

Here are some of todays images. Some of them are by my girlfriend. Enjoy!

Macro World

Today we are in macro heaven. I've previosly borrowed a friends Canon 100mm F/2.8 Macro lense, but now my girlfriend just recieved hers. All I can say is that it is wonderful. Extremely sharp and great to work with. Images are sharp from the lense - even if it is wide open.

Compared to the Sigma 105mm macro, the images are very compareable, but the build quality is just a lot better. Also the internal focusing is really great. Even though automatic focus isn't much needed for macro work, the USM makes the lense usable at other than macro lengths.

We bought a bunch of flowers. Here are some closeups: