I had my camera with me while I was walking the dog down the street. I came across a sparse patch of daisy flowers and decided to do a cheapskate creative macro technique. I only had my 35-70mm lens with me and I knew that even though it had a "Macro" label on the focusing distance window, it still does not provide a true macro feature. Sure enough, it only allowed me a somewhat acceptable 6 inches of decent focus before everything went uncontrollable out of focus below that 6-inch range. I wanted to get in there tighter and closer. So I pulled the lens from the camera body and reversed it. This brought me to about an inch and a half to the subject with such clarity that I even saw little insects lurking at the center of the daisy. (With this 35-70mm reverse-lens method, the falloff on the focus starts to occur drastically at about an inch. I'm not even going to bother focusing in that range or less.)

Ofcourse, once to you take the lens off, you can't control the aperture setting. (My LCD showed "00" on the aperture number.) The soft, painterly blur effect on the first two photos were not photoshopped or digitally altered with a blur or filter. It's an inherent bokeh effect from reversing the lens and having such shallow depth.

During this photo taking, my goddamn wonderful dog decided to shit potty on a spot of grass nearby. Thus, ended my macro interest for the day.

A Canon EOS D60 with an EF 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 lens was used. This was a no-brainer simple one-light set up a la strobist style using a white corner wall area. I had an off-camera strobe mounted on a 4-foot light stand with a shoot-through umbrella. (The strobe was rigged with a wireless transmitter/receiver.) The strobe was aimed at the ceiling to give an even ambient light. The light coming from the ceiling bounced to the corner walls to the left and right of the model. The walls, in effect, served as ghetto natural reflectors that filled the shadows. The hotspots of highlights on the candy rose/flower in the first image with the bokeh (blur) effect gives away the position of the strobe in relation to the subject.

Special thanks to model Jennifer Lee for this photo session.

All images are © Copyrighted.

I took my first HDR (high dynamic range) image early this evening. Below is the original photo of a Japanese garden bridge taken at dusk with the exposure at f/8, 15s (no flash). Also, I didn't use umbrellas, reflector, or a softbox. Just me, my camera, and bag of McDonald's french fries at the location (no, I did not litter):

Using a series of bracketed images of the same scene taken at 7 unique exposures (okay, 7 may have been overkill), I was able to synthesize a somewhat detailed and high range photo as displayed below:

Ofcourse, the HDR image feels less natural and more like a CG scene from an epic fantasy movie... or it looks like I used a full lighting equipment! But the idea of HDR imaging is to capture a greater range of tonality and details — especially on areas of shadows and light where tone and detail would normally be lost, overexposed, or underexposed.

Below are three of the key exposures I used:

This is a photo of me setting up the tripod, aligning the camera with the intended scene, and mind-numbingly & patiently waiting for dusk to happen. The image of me was taken using a regular point-and-shoot Canon propped up on a tree. The camera setting: Auto. (Can't go wrong with Auto setting! Perfect white balance almost 90% of the time! Haha.)

My photography work with model Jennifer Lee.

Images © and All Rights Reserved.

This work by Cedric Nocon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at cedricnocon.com. Images posted with consent from model.
Duplication, distribution, or printing of the images by any other party other than the photographer or model is not allowed.
Model is over the age of 18 years old.