What equipment I need, please help.

[webexplorer]

Good day. Don't know if here is the right place I could post my question. I am totally new in photography, amaze to see stunning photos of insects in this forum especially huge magnification of eyes and legs. Can I do the same thing by my own hand? What kind of skill, lens and accessories I need to achieve this?

Currently, I have a 300D and just bought last night a 350D Kit plus a Tamron 90mm DI marco lens & a 25mm ET. The first attempt was absolutely a failure as DOF very narrow, picture is blur due to camera shaking or inaccuracte focus even mounted on a tripod. The spider only occupies a tiny portion on the frame. How can I fill up the whole frame with a 1cm spider?

Thank you.

[LordV]

You would need to use a full set of extension tubes (68mm of Kenko tubes) or perhaps reverse a 50mm lens (kit lens ?) onto the front of your macro lens. Doing this will make the DOF problem worse and the focus distance even shorter. Regards DOF etc- most of us use flash (ETTL) with the camera set to manual around 1/160th F11-F16. You can do this with the built in flash but any additions to the lens tend to make it obscure the subject.
Brian V.

[webexplorer]

You would need to use a full set of extension tubes (68mm of Kenko tubes) or perhaps reverse a 50mm lens (kit lens ?) onto the front of your macro lens. Doing this will make the DOF problem worse and the focus distance even shorter. Regards DOF etc- most of us use flash (ETTL) with the camera set to manual around 1/160th F11-F16. You can do this with the built in flash but any additions to the lens tend to make it obscure the subject.
Brian V.
Thanks Brian. Full set of tubes meaning to join 2 or more tubes together? Will a poor tripod lower the quality?

[dpastern]

The 90mm Tamron macro should give you 1:1 (ie. life size). So, a 1cm spider should be filling nearly half of the frame. The rest you can crop to suit. Adding tubes will help with increasing the magnification, but beware your working distance from the insect will decrease the more the magnification increases. This is unavoidable.

To avoid shutter speed, try and increase shutter speeds to be above 1/150 sec. Use a f stop in the range of f11-f13 as well. As to getting sharp images, that's practice, and lots of it. As to DOF, with macro it's always narrow, it's part 'n' parcel of the game.

Dave

[webexplorer]

The 90mm Tamron macro should give you 1:1 (ie. life size). So, a 1cm spider should be filling nearly half of the frame. The rest you can crop to suit. Adding tubes will help with increasing the magnification, but beware your working distance from the insect will decrease the more the magnification increases. This is unavoidable.

To avoid shutter speed, try and increase shutter speeds to be above 1/150 sec. Use a f stop in the range of f11-f13 as well. As to getting sharp images, that's practice, and lots of it. As to DOF, with macro it's always narrow, it's part 'n' parcel of the game.

Dave
Thank you so much, I shall try it out. Cheers.

[Lester Wareham]

If you are new to insect macro you may want to try using flash, this will at least eliminate movement, progress to natural light later.

Even with flash you might want to try a monopod to help keep the focus where you want it and reduce the physical strain.

I would stick to life size (ie closest focus of your macro lens) at present and crop images of very small subjects that don't fill the frame. Many of the images here are crops.