Macro playtime with the 7D

I haven't done much macro work recently, and was wondering what the 18MP of the 7D will make of  my 100mm f2.8 macro lens.  I was planning on heading out to the garden to capture something interesting, but as it decided to rain I've picked a few indoor things to shoot...

I started by getting my flash bracket out to mount the flash on, but on trying this I realised that there is no vertical movement on the bracket, so the flash can only point forwards.  This is fine for weddings or portraits where you want the flash out of the line of the lens, but not really any good for macro.

I then remembered about the 7D's master control for Canon flashes, so I put my 430EX in slave mode and set the camera up to trigger the off-camera flash as the only flash (the lens casts too much of a shadow to use the on-camera flash as well).  The flash was positioned either by balancing on various things around, or by hand holding.

The camera setup was manual mode at 1/160s at f9 for most of the shots, with the flash using E-TTL metering to adjust the level (i.e. the camera makes the flash fire a test flash which the camera metering system measures, and the results are used to adjust the flash power when the shot is actually taken).

Get the Point?

This first shot was a pencil resting on a Christmas candle.  The flash was fired from above, with aluminium foil as a reflector underneath the pencil to bring some light to the underside.  The glitter on the candle has given rise to the interesting bokeh (out of focus highlights) in the background.

Drip

This was the same pencil, dipped in a glass of water, and the flash fired from close to the back-right of the bencil - this leads to a black background which helps isolate the detail in the image.

More Cotton Buds II

The first day I got my macro lens nearly 2 years ago, I took a shot of some cotton buds and it's been one of my favourite macro shots to date.  I love the detail in the fibres and the grouping of the buds themselves.  This is a slightly different image, converted to black and white to draw attention to the detail in the fibres.

Colours

The colours of a few pencils.  I had a big long line of them on the table, but with macro shots you get such a tiny amount of the image (a few millimetres) in focus, I decided to centre around the focussed pencil end.  The shadows under the pencils annoy me a bit, and I think the image would be better on a plain platform - something to play with next time...

Can You Guess What It Is Yet?

Well, it's a blueberry if you haven't guessed!  Flash lit from the left to create a half-silhouette.  I took a few others of the blueberry, but I liked this one best as it was a bit more interesting.

Conclusions

I'm not really sure there's much to conclude here, other than the 7D is great at macro too!  It really is a very good camera.  Even with the pixel density of 18MP on the APS-C sensor, it still manages to resolve a huge amount of detail at pixel level.  I haven't put 100% crops on this page as it was just to show the sort of results you can get from the 7D with macro lens, but I'll do a more detailed analysis of it's capabilities shortly.