Steve Winter has been a contributing wildlife photographer for National Geographic. In this video, shot for Wired, he explains his thought process on composition and how he selects his best images. A lot of what he does I have been doing as well, although I tend to shoot more portraits. Steve says some things about framing with the view finder and cropping that sound familiar to me for some odd reason ..read more

It only took me 12 years, but I finally published Extreme Macro the Art of Patience Volume II today. It is available in several formats and should already be available in Apple eBook format from Blurb (from Apple as well as soon as they accept it). The add for it on the sidebar to the right. In my last post I spoke about my adventures in cropping, something that I had to do for the book to an extent because the 3x2 aspect ratio of my images did not always fit the aspect ratio of the book. But there is another reason why I am going to crop more in the future, and it is an issue of technique. I ..read more

Back when I started shooting color positive slides in the late 80s there was a lot of emphasis on using the viewfinder for composition, and to crop in post only when necessary. Composing with the viewfinder has made me a better photographer, and in time while framing one scene other compositions would pop into my head. Subject permitting, I can get those scenes into the camera so composing with the viewfinder is a good thing. I also wanted to keep as many pixels as possible because when I make prints, I like to print them poster size (90CMx60CM on matte canvas and gallery wrapped). Back when I ..read more

I took second place in the Bugslife Bug Photography Awards in the flies, bees. ants, and wasps category for this shot ..read more

I am a contender in the Global Billboard Project. If you like my work, then please go to the Global Billboard Project web site and the Twitter post and give me a like. Thanks ..read more

This video pretty much shattered my preconcieved notions about the number of pixels needed for a large print. I have even made poster size prints with 10MP and 12MP images that looked great, so why am I still hung up on not cropping my photos? Maybe I should not be ..read more

I have posted about this before, both here at my blog and on various forums. But for the most part it was in bits and pieces until recently, and I need to not only boil the whole concept down but also to have it in one single article. Nothing here is really new, and the tl;dr is "Stop shooting in bad light". But you might not understand why the light you are shooting in is working against you. Light has two basic properties: It is either hard or soft, specular or diffused. Soft/hard light depends on the size of the light source relative to the subject. The larger the light relative to the sub ..read more

A lot of you are shooting in natural light that is specular (not diffused) and it's killing your image quality. For those of you using a flash I'd describe the vast majority of you shooting with light that's "soft specular" -soft shadows cause the light source is large relative to the subject. But specular because there's a hot spot in your diffuser and it's blowing out a lot of the detail in your images. I've seen people post triple digit focus stacks that had less detail than my single frame images due to poor light quality. After speaking with multiple people across multiple forums about th ..read more

I've probably spent the better part of a decade trying to wrap my head around flash photography and how to diffuse a harsh point source like a twin flash in as short of a space as possible. For field macro you just don't have a lot of room to work, so any diffusion scheme has to be compact. I also like to use a twin flash as two separate light sources, in a key (one head at the top of the lens) and fill (one head off to the side) configuration because it gives me a lot of control over the highlights and shadows. It also allow me to partially wrap light around the subject so that it doesn't loo ..read more

Mr. Ahron Wayne contacted me via my Extreme Macro Facebook page to tell me about a Kickstarter project that he and a team of engineering students have been working on. It's a motorized scanning macro camera: I wasn't all that excited, because I shoot single frames of active subjects, until I saw it track a moving critter in the video! Pretty cool :) This isn't a paid add, or an endorsement of the Kickstarter campaign, I just thought it was a really interesting project and I know a lot of you are going to be interested in it as well ..read more