#160 Power Macro Sat-Sun November 9-10, 2024

This two-day workshop covers macro photography techniques up to 20x magnifications and can even be applied to maximizing depth of field for landscape photographers. We will meet at the Farmington Hills Studio for instruction and practice on shooting techniques, then a demonstration of how to assemble the composite images into a spectacular image that you could not possible get in just one shot.  Learn to fill the frame with the head of a pin or the glistening facets of a fly’s eye. It is hard to imagine that the same technique can be applied to landscape photography; but it can!  Learn to photograph a landscape where the foreground is six feet away, the subject is twelve feet away and the back ground is twenty or more feet away and yet create a photo where everything is in incredibly sharp focus well beyond what you could achieve in just one exposure. Explore the fascinating worlds of ordinary objects such as watch parts or cell phone innards. We will be photographing diverse subjects including insects, small machines, flowers, computer chips, gemstones, coins, and postage stamps. Both the scientific and artistic aspects of macro photography will be discussed and demonstrated. We will have at least four stations set up with bellows, macro lenses and various macro lighting opportunities.  Students will have ample opportunity to shoot each setup, learning various techniques to combat vibration, moving live subjects, using extension tubes or macro lenses to achieve perfect exposure, exposure computation and magnification computation to get unbelievable sharpness. We will discuss rare macro lenses such as Photars, Luminars, and Macro-Summars; and high quality macro photography using low cost darkroom enlarging lenses. The landscape style focus stacking portion is also taught at the Farmington Hills location as we will walk across the street to photograph objects that are very close to the camera and objects that are very far from the camera and still put them all in sharp focus. The Sunday afternoon session which is at our Southfield campus involves macro stacking with computer programs such as Adobe Photo Merge and Helicon Soft. Helicon Soft is a program that tethers your camera to a laptop computer and shoots 10-20 photos or more to be combined into one photo composite to create a depth-of-field not possible in one actual shot. Learn to reverse mount regular photographic lenses for magnifications up to 20x.  Our bellows have T-mount adaptors so we can accommodate Sony, Nikon and Canon EOS systems.  If you have a different platform, please plan to bring your own T-mount adapter. Bring any of your own macro gear and we will demonstrate techniques to push it to the limits. MPW has a large assortment of small objects to photograph, if you want to bring in your own, we will be glad to teach you how to shoot them.