Travel Adventures
Most photographers would agree that super macro photography means the production of photos with reproduction ratios greater than 1:1. Therefore super macro photography leads us to the mysterious world of hidden beauty. Without special equipment our eyes can’ t see it.
Generally, in order to achieve these levels of magnification, we need to use a‘ normal’ macro lens with one or more additional specialised tools such as a dry diopter, wet diopter, teleconverter or an extension tube.
The 60mm for Canon or Nikon and the 100mm for Canon( 105mm for Nikon) are basic macro lenses. They are used
42 The MAG Vung Tau often and they work well for macro photography. But for super macro photography, the 100mm Canon( 105mm Nikon) macro lens works best. It allows us to keep the distance and provides more space for stacking diopters.
The 60mm macro lens combined with wet diopters is also used, but the focus distance will be extremely short. The 60mm lens has a small working distance, which means we will be fairly close to the glass of the wet diopter when shooting small subjects. We can use it with static, slow or not shy subjects( e. g., tiny nudibranch, skeleton shrimp etc.), but for shy or moving subjects( i. e., tiny fish, pygmy seahorse) it is better to use a 100mm with wet diopters.
Let’ s move on to the additional specialised tools. As I mentioned earlier, these tools are: dry diopters, wet diopters, teleconverters and extension tubes. I tried all of them and my choice is using wet diopters for super macro photography.
There are some disadvantages while using the other tools which I prefer to avoid, namely:
• The disadvantage of“ dry” diopters is that the diopter must be used for the entire dive. It’ s not possible to add or to change the diopter underwater. The lens