One of the things that I learned shooting macro is that even though shooting wide open provides a nicely thin DOF while needing less light, there is often a need for the aperture to be stopped down in order to get detail across the entire subject that one wants to focus on. So when I was first getting into macro, I didn’t really need to worry about this much as the flowers that I was shooting really didn’t have more than one or two features that I wanted to be sharp. Unfortunately, this made me lazy when it came to shooting macros of larger objects (I think I made mention of this on a previous post), not stopping down to ensure I had a larger DOF left me with some awkward and sometimes unusable shots and me thinking “it would have been better if”.
So even though you have the option of using the DOF preview button to stop down the lens to what it will take the shot at, but then the viewfinder often darkens to a point as it will be less than useful. So this is when having a mental appreciation of how a given focal length, fstop and subject size combine work better than the technical solution. I’ve found that using P and then studying the EXIF information afterwards for shots that work and don’t work is really useful in an effort to gain this appreciation.
It would be great then to have the time to shoot in M all the time and compose as that appreciation would guide you, but that is not always the case. When you are traveling and shooting for fun in a context that is continually changing, you can’t always take the time, but you can check what the camera is giving you. That is what I’ve started to do and I know I did that on this shot. I remember framing up the lizard when s/he finally stopped moving and checking to see what the fstop was and thinking that it might be close to get the critter all in. As it turns out, the camera almost got it right. I tried to take another shot just after this at f8, but s/he was moving far too fast to frame up nicely.
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