I woke up this morning knowing that the light rain we had last night would leave beautiful dewdrops on the leaves in the backyard. But to fully appreciate them you'd need to be able to see them in the photo, which meant the actual subject would need to be as small as possible. Well Ant-Man, of course! This particular Ant-Man is really small, about an inch high. I decided to use my 50mm lens with an extension tube to shoot this as close up as possible. If you're not familiar with extension tubes, they're adaptors that go between the camera body and the lens mount. The extension tube positions your lens farther from the camera, and the front element closer to the subject. Closer focus equals more magnification. It essentially transforms your regular lens into a macro lens, and at substantially less cost. There is some light loss when using an extension tube so you need to have an abundance of light, often more than what Mother Nature provides. To remedy this I attached my Manfrotto Lumimuse 8 LED light to my camera and set it to it's highest output. I think the results speak for themselves - a beautiful, crisp, closeup focus you would have a very hard time achieving without an extension tube or macro lens. My two favorite images from the shoot are below - similar but different.
And here's a photo showing my camera outfitted with the Manfrotto Lumimuse LED light. The extension tube lays next to the camera, on the floor. I decided to handhold my camera for this shot, no tripod, so holstering my camera on my waist using the Spiderholster was invaluable for freeing up my hands while I got Ant-Man into position.
