Close-Up Photography

"...taking close-up pictures is easy, and you get great results!"

Close -up or macro photography is ideal place for any beginning underwater photographer to start. It is not too difficult.

Your main aim is to take full-frame well composed and correctly exposed pictures of small subjects. Such subjects could include anemones, nudibranchs, coral polyps. fish portraits, shrimp, and countless other small creatures.

Close-up photography is also a great eye-opener, as you often see far more detail in your pictures than during the dive. It is only natural for people to want to learn more about what they photograph. The more you know the more you will find to photograph.

Close-up Photography Using a Housed Camera

You can take close up pictures using a single lens reflex camera (such as Nikon F4, or N70) in an underwater housing.
There are several advantages to using cameras in housings, you have a greater choice of lenses you can use, you see exactly what you will get through the lens. You don't need a wire framer to estimate distance, which often has the effect of scaring fish away when you are trying to get a picture of one. However, for this advantage you get a corresponding increase in price.

Extension-Tubes and close-up outfits

A big advantage with using extension tubes and close-up outfits for underwater photography is that you do all your camera setting up before you go into the water. During the dive you can concentrate more on the dive, all you have to do is find a suitably interesting subject, frame it and press the shutter. Even better, the photos you get are, more often than not, far better than you would get with wide angle. The colors are often brilliant, and you don't have to worry about suspended particles in the water.

You don't need to have crystal clear conditions to get great pictures. You can take great pictures in 30 meter visibility, or in 3 meter visibility.

Extension tubes are used with Nikonos rangefinder cameras such as Nikonos V and Nikonos III. An extension tube is a tube that fits between the camera and lens that alter the optical characteristic of the lens and lets you take full-frame pictures of small objects. An extension tube system includes both the tube and framer. The framer provides an outline of the picture area and shows the photographer where the lens is focused.

Close-up or Macro kits are designed to accomplish the same goal but they go about it in a different way. A macro kit consists of a lens and framer that fit over the primary lens.

• A 1:1 extension tube and framer allows you to reproduce a life size image on film. In other words, the image you see on film is the exact same size as the object.
• A 1:2 system reproduces an image that is one-half life size, and a 1:3 system yields an image that is one third life size. With a 1:2 system, a two-inch long fish would be one-inch long on film, creating a reproduction ratio of 1:2.
• A 2:1 extension tube and framer produces a magnified image on film, one in which the image on film is twice the size of the actual life size subject. This magnified image is available only for Nikonos extension tube systems.

One of the major advantages of extension tube and macro kit system is the ability to completely set up your camera system before you get into the water so you don't have think about anything technical once you're in the water. However, that does mean that the camera settings have to be correct, otherwise you could end up with the entire roll of film out of focus or badly exposed.

Setting Up Your Camera for Close-up

With extension tubes and framers made by Nikonos, you will want to set the lens on minimum focus and f/22. The reason the lens should be set on minimum focus for the Nikonos framers is that the framers are designed to reference the plane of focus when the lens is focused at the minimum focus distance. However, other manufactures design their extension tube framers to focus the lens on infinity. By using the infinity setting for the 35mm lens, the optics are sharper because the lens is designed for it's best optics at infinity.

When using an extension tube system, the lens aperture should be set on f/22 or f/16. You want the greatest depth-of field possible. A 1-1 extension tube will give a much narrower depth of field than a 1-3 extension tube.

Even though your Nikonos lens indicates f/22, when you are shooting with extension tubes you are actually allowing much less light to strike the film than a normal f/22 setting, this means that to properly expose your film, you need to use a flashgun, and place it very close to your subject.

Nikonos and Close-up Kit

With the Nikonos Close-up Kit you focus the lens on infinity and set the aperture
on f/22 or f16.

Flash Synch. Speeds

The synch speed setting for a Nikonos V camera is 1/90th of a second. Slower speeds, such as 1/60th of a second, will also work just fine with Nikonos cameras, but if the speed is too slow and there is too much ambient light you shots may not be sharp.

Using a flashgun will give you an effective shutter speed of anything from 1/250th to 1/1000th of a second will yield extremely crisp images. Because the aperture is so small(f/22), ambient light does not expose the film in most macro situations.

Most macro photographers prefer to use films with comparatively slow film speeds because those films produce images with less grain and better colour saturation. The films of choice for macro photography tend to be Kodachrome 25, Fuji 50, Kodachrome 64, and Velvia.