Brief Introduction To Macro Photography

Macro photography is also called "close-up photography". It is the photography art to produce very fine details of relatively small subjects like spiders, bugs, insects, flower petals etc. When you do macro photography, you basically magnify your close up subjects using the lens glasses. There are some zoom lenses available for the Nikon D90 and other DSLR cameras as well which have particularly close focusing capabilities, making them macro lenses. When you use that type of lenses for macro photography, you may not get the best results when you go more closer to the subject as you can't get more lights into the censor bouncing through the subject. Camera to the subject distance is the most important factor when you are doing macro photography. So in this case, we can have few other alternatives for macro photography. The first one is getting a dedicated macro lens and the second one is to use the extension tube attached to the regular lens. Depending on the budget and the type of camera you have, you might have to go with either one of the two options I just mentioned above.

If the budget is not an issue for you, the best option would be to get a DSLR camera and a dedicated macro lens which fits into the camera. Nikon, Canon and other camera brands provide a dedicated lens for macro photography which is specifically designed to take a close up images allowing more lights into the subject which then passes to the camera sensor through the lens. Such dedicated macro lenses are built with 1:1 magnification capability.

Macro Extension Tube for Nikon

And the second alternative is to use the extension tube which goes between the camera body and the lens. Extension tubes do not have any optical components. It just extends the distance of your lens to the sensor or the film so that you can shoot in a closer focusing distance and achieve a greater magnification. There are different types of extension tubes available in the market. You can use any one of them based on your camera type and the lens specifications.

There are various other cheaper ways to shoot macro as well. For example, you can also use the filters like diopters that goes in front of the lens. I have read somewhere that you can do macro shot with the reverse filters too.

Personally, I think have a dedicated macro (some brand also says micro) lens is the best option to achieve a crisp, clear and magnified details of small subjects which we called macro photography or close-up photography.

Alphabets Printed On The Nikon Lenses And Their Meanings

If you look at the lens from any manufacturer, you will notice some numerical and alphabetical prints on it. They are printed there to let the buyers know about the feature and the quality of the lens. Sometimes it might be confusing to understand the meaning of those numbers and symbols and decide about the type of the lens you are trying to get based on that information. When I bought my first lens a couple of years ago, I went through the same confusion. And that is why I am trying to make a note of some of the abbreviations that Nikon uses on it's lenses so that you can make a informed decision about the Nikon lenses. Without wasting much time, let's take a look at them one by one and see what does it really mean for us as a lens buyer.

AF - AF stands for Autofocus but the lens does not come with it’s own motor for auto-focusing. The lens can auto focus only when it is coupled with the camera body which comes with the autofocus motor inside the camera body.

AF-S - AF-S stands for Autofocus with a silent-wave autofocus motor built inside the lens. By using this type of lens, you can achieve autofocus whether the camera body comes with it’s own focusing motor or not.

If you want to know more about an AF lens and an AF-S lens and how does it work with different types of camera body, please check out my blog - Autofocus Is Not Working On My Nikon D5100.

DX - It means the lens was primarily built for those Digital SLRs which utilize a smaller sensor or cropped sensor and known as DX format or APS-C sensor format body. Technically, you can use a DX lens on both DX format camera and FX format camera, but you may end up getting a circular image in the middle of the black frame if you are using a DX lens on a FX camera body. This is because FX type camera has a bigger sensor and the image produce by a DX lens can’t fill in the full sensor area.

Nikon Lens

D - It means the Lens equipped with a "chip" which allows the camera body to assess the distance of the subject being photographed and expose for that subject correctly.

DC - DC stands for Defocus Control. A lens is designed primarily for portraiture that allows you to selectively defocus the image.

ED - ED stands for Extra-Low Dispersion Glass. It is basically a glass coating that doesn't disperse light as it enters the lens as other normal glass does and obtain optimum correction of chromatic aberrations.

G - It means the lens’ aperture is electronically controlled and does not have an aperture ring on it. Some of the Nikkor lenses will have an aperture ring allowing physical, manual aperture control which is designed for the older bodies.

IF - IF stands for Internal Focusing which means it doesn't change its length of the lens as you focus it. CPU built inside the lens controls focus in the lens itself. Lens will not expand or shrink when you focus subjects and it's front element doesn't move either.

Micro - Nikon's proprietary trade name for a macro lens. "Micro" and "macro" mean the same thing for Nikon lens.

N - Nano crystal coating. A high-tech coating used on lenses to reduce ghosting and flare. In the early days, Nikon used letters like P (penta, 5 elements), N (nano, 9 elements) to indicate how many elements a lens had. Now Nikon reused a letter N to indicate nano crystal coating.

VR - VR stands for Vibration Reduction. It is an image stabilizer technology introduced by the Nikon allowing a photographer to reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or its subject specially when they are not using tripods. It actually allows photographers to shoot with 2-4 stops slower shutter speed than without VR lens and still produce sharper image.

Ø - Filter diameter that correctly fits into the lens. Common filter diameters are 49mm, 52mm, 58mm, 62mm, 67mm and 72mm.

If you see something like f/3.5-5.6 numbers printed on your lens, that means your lens maximum aperture is f/3.5 when it's fully zoomed out (at the lowest focal range) and f/5.6 when it's fully zoomed in (at the highest focal range).

I hope this explanation helps you to understand some of the nomenclature Nikon uses on their lenses and assist you to decide which lens you should buy or what to look for when you are shopping for your next lens.

Happy shooting!

How To Setup Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB)

I wrote a blog about the exposure compensation and bracketing last month where I talked about the exposure compensation, when to use it and what does the bracketing mean? In this blog, I am going to talk about the Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and how to set the controls to activate the exposure bracketing feature for the Nikon D90 or any other DSLR in that matter although the menu settings and the controls might be in different places for a different camera. Sometimes, manually bracketing and taking multiple shots will be forgetful and tedious job. And that is the main reason we use Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) feature available in most of the advance DSLRs. When AEB is activated, camera will take three (or more depending on the camera model and the settings applied) shots automatically provided that you are in a continuous shooting mode or a burst shooting mode. Once the automatic bracketing is activated, when you press the shutter release button once, it takes the first picture at the camera measured exposure, second picture with a negative exposure compensation (usually -1/3 EV but Nikon D90 allows you to specify a different value), and the third with a positive exposure compensation (usually +1/3 EV).

How to set Nikon D90 for AEB?

Nikon D90 Bracketing Menu

1. Press the Menu button on the left side of your camera.

2. Navigate to the Custom Settings Menu (Pencil icon).

3. Go to e bracketing/flash menu and option e4 is for setting up Auto Bracketing with different options.

4. Inside auto bracketing, you have other options available as well to set for but Automatic Exposure (AE) is what we are discussing here.

You can also set the order of how you would want your camera to take the pictures whether it is in the order of correct exposure first, under exposure second and over exposure at last or under exposure first, correct exposure second and over exposure is at third. In order to set that order, you have to go to e6 Bracketing order menu under e bracketing/flash menu and set whichever order you want. This doesn't make any difference on the exposure but just the order in which photographs will be taken and saved in the memory.

Nikon D90 Bracketing Button

Now the next step is to set the exposure value and the number of frames you would want. Nikon D90 allows you to shoot 2 frames over exposed and one correctly exposed (+2F) or 2 frame under exposed and one correctly exposed (-2F) or traditional 3F which gives one under exposed, one correctly exposed and one over exposed picture. So the maximum number of frames for Nikon D90 is 3. In order to setup +2F, -2F or 3F, press the BKT button on the left side of the camera, just below the flash button, and once the button is pressed, you will see an option displayed on the top LCD near the shutter release button to set the exposure value and the number of frames. While pressing the bracketing button, rotate the main command dial to change the number of frames whether it is +2F, -2F or 3F and use the sub command dial to change how much you want to shift the exposure value for the under and the over exposed photographs. Once you are done with all those setup, your camera is ready to take the bracketed shots.

Automatic Exposure Bracketing is a great feature if you want to blend multiple exposure shots and extract the details and the shadows by creating an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. This technique is getting increasingly popular in landscape photography and I use it almost every time when I shoot night cityscapes .