Close Up/Macro with the 500 PF

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Andrew Lamberson

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Who says you can't do Macro with the 500PF when the opportunity arises? You just need to go back to the "old days" of manual focus!

Male Autumn Meadowhawk. Probably the last emergence of the year, cold weather is on the way. This little dragonfly is about 1.2" long!

Nikon Z 6 II, 500 PF, f/6.3 1/1250 sec. ISO 800 Handheld! (that's why I was using 1/1250 !!)

Autumn Meadowhawk male 500 pf-0522.jpg
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Beautiful image!
Who says you can't do Macro with the 500PF when the opportunity arises? You just need to go back to the "old days" of manual focus!
Agreed, I use both my 500mm PF and perhaps even more my 300mm PF (often with a 1.4x TC) as macro lenses. I'll take it a step further and use real old school macro technique, run MF, spin the focus to the minimum focusing distance and then move the camera in and out to achieve critical focus for live and twitchy macro subjects. For static subjects then I'll run AF and a tripod and focus stack but for live stuff that moves just fixing the focus as close as possible and moving in and out seems to work well.
 
I actually took 3 shots of this one head, one middle, and one abdomen. I am going to try to focus stack them in Photoshop after class this afternoon.

Does anyone have any tips on an article to read or video to watch that clearly explains it??
 
I actually took 3 shots of this one head, one middle, and one abdomen. I am going to try to focus stack them in Photoshop after class this afternoon.

Does anyone have any tips on an article to read or video to watch that clearly explains it??
Very cool.

Photoshop usually does a very good job with small image stacks (e.g. 2,3,4 images) you basically just open all the images as layers in PS and select all layers by selecting the bottom or top layer and then Shift Clicking the top or bottom layer respectively. Then go to the Edit menu and hit Auto-Align Layers to get the images well aligned as even small focusing differences can change alignment due to focus breathing even using a stable tripod. Then you go to the Edit menu again and select Auto-Blend Layers Stack mode.

Either that works and you get a good blend or you may end up with some blending artifacts like halos created by out of focus areas of one image overlaying in focus areas of another image. You can clean those artifacts up by editing the layer masks created during the stacking process but it can be time consuming.
 
Who says you can't do Macro with the 500PF when the opportunity arises? You just need to go back to the "old days" of manual focus!

Male Autumn Meadowhawk. Probably the last emergence of the year, cold weather is on the way. This little dragonfly is about 1.2" long!

Nikon Z 6 II, 500 PF, f/6.3 1/1250 sec. ISO 800 Handheld! (that's why I was using 1/1250 !!)

View attachment 26260
Beautiful shot!
 
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