Flower Imaging

I use a Canon EOS A2 35 mm auto focus camera and their EF 100 mm f2.8 macro lens for most of my flower photography. This 100 mm focal length macro lens can focus down to about 18 inches, but I often add a hollow extension tube between the camera and lens to get down to less than an inch if need be.

I also usually carry a small Yashica T4 Super. This simple-to-use "weatherproof" camera has a Zeiss f3.5 lens with a 35 mm focal length lens (not zoom) and produces excellent high contrast pictures.

With the Canon EOS I almost always use a tripod since short distances usually require a large f-stop to get an acceptable depth of focus and this means fairly long exposures. My favorite is a lightweight SLIK 444-Sport II model with their Single Action Pan head. This fairly light ball head has a gun-like handle and can be pointed down at a very steep angle if necessary.

Kodachrome film is my normal choice and I've been using 200 speed to enable me to take hand held shots occasionally. I'm beginning to notice the grain and will probably soon switch back to the more common Kodachrome 64.

I prefer slides because they can be effectively stored in transparent sheets in three ring binders. With a good light table and a small magnifier (Schneider LUPE 4x MC from B & H Photo), it's relatively easy to retrieve particular rolls of film and select good images.

Recently (summer of 1998) I've started using an Olympic D-600L to take digital pictures of our garden. I still use a tripod for most photos and many images appear to be at least as good as those I get from my more conventional camera and digitizer. The two shortcomings of this camera are the limited storage of super high quality images and fact that the camera selects f-stop and exposure automatically, giving me no ability to play with depth of field. However, it is indeed nice to take a photo and have it on the computer screen a few minutes later. Typically, if it's a photo taken in our garden after 1998, the monthly image on the Visual Garden home page will have been taken with this camera.

A good place to start for more information about camera equipment is photonet.

I digitize my images using a Polaroid SprintScan35 10-bit per color scanner which can handle slides and negatives directly. This is one of the original units so doesn't exactly correspond to any of the current models. Judging from the prices it probably corresponds closest to the current 35SE model.

In my opinion one gets much better digital images scanning from slides or negatives rather than prints. Certainly the contrast range of the raw material is much better, but even better is that some automatic machine hasn't botched the printing process.

I currently use a Power Macintosh 8500/180 with an AppleVision 1705 monitor. It's got 64 Meg of memory and 5 Geg of hard drive space. The monitor can be color calibrated to match my particular room light. I leave the gamma at the Apple default setting of 1.8. The result is not perfect on WinTel products, but in my opinion the fault lies elsewhere.

My images are scanned into Adobe Photoshop 4.0 using the plugin software provided by Polaroid. The Polaroid software allows you to tune the scanner to a particular slide, but I still use the features of Photoshop to tune the color, remove blemishes, set the image size, and sharpen the edges of the image. I try to stay faithful to the original image, but everyone should be aware that "seeing is believing" is no longer valid.