Macro Manoeuvres In The Sunshine with Will Cheung & MPB

[View Online]( [Sponsor]( [ePHOTOzine]() Macro Manoeuvres In The Sunshine Summer is just over the horizon and with gardens full of colour and nature reserves across the land buzzing with bug life, it's a great time to indulge in some macro photography. Will Cheung gets close up and personal, with the help of [MPB](. Everyone’s lives changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As photographers, with minimal warning, we had to find fresh ways to enjoy our cameras during lockdown. Many photographers found an interest in nature and macro shooting, and that included me. I spent time enjoying butterfly photography in a nature reserve that was a ten-minute walk from home. That interest broadened as the summer wore on and damselflies and dragonflies became targets for my lens too, and I spent many hours wandering around with my macro lens and newly acquired ring flash. My interest in butterflies, damselflies and dragonflies has continued in these post-pandemic days and while I’m no expert on these insects I soon learnt to tell the difference between a speckled wood and a ringlet, and a four-spotted chaser and a migrant hawker. Will Cheung I was thinking about this year’s shooting activity when I came up with a radical plan, partly inspired after I interviewed a chap called Geraint Radford for a magazine feature. He’s an OM System ambassador and a macro expert and he got me enthused by the potential of the in-camera focus stacking feature available in several Olympus/OM System cameras as a way to achieve a decent depth-of-field but with a good degree of control. Being able to stack up to 15 individual images at f/4 or f/5.6 would mean good sharpness in the subject and still ensure the background would be nicely blurred. Shooting at f/16 might give a similar depth-of-field but it’d also sharpen up the background and that is not always a good thing. After checking out some YouTube videos and pictures taken with focus stacking, I thought the OM System OM-1 would deliver what I wanted. A new OM-1 body costs around £1979. A search on [MPB’s website]( showed there was a selection of ‘as new’ samples available at £1719. There was a cheaper model at £1629 which was rated as excellent. I added a camera to my shopping basket to get the process started... To read this article in full, click the button below [Macro Photography with Will Cheung]( To advertise in our newsletter, sent to over 100,000 subscribers, please contact: advertising@ephotozine.com As well as our free, informative monthly newsletter we may occasionally let you know about special offers, competitions, photo seminars or discounts we think you'll be interested in. If you want to unsubscribe from receiving these messages, [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Policy]( Magezine Publishing Limited is registered in England and Wales as a limited company. Registered Number: 5218362. VAT registration Number: 845 6759 78. Registered Office: Tower House, Lucy Tower Street, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, LN1 1XW