Photocritic photography blog

I haven’t actually tried it myself, but I recently stumbled over a piece of software called HeliconFocus. It promises to eliminate the DOF problem you get when photographing objects. Just imagine: You can photograph on the sweet spot of your lens (around f8 seems to be the highest sharpness / DOF tradeoff for most of my lenses), yet get everything in the image in complete, perfect focus!

Of course, this is a genius invention for people who work with Macro photography especially… Read the rest of the article »

Not strictly photography, but this project carries the Do It Yourself torch with such passion that I couldn’t let it go! Besides, if you decide to buid one of these, all you have to do is to add a photo camera to the end (it’s as easy as taking a compact camera and gaffer-taping it to the end of one of the eye-pieces), and you can use it for photography purposes!

A stereo-zoom microscope is a stereoscopic microscope in which the variation of magnification is continuous. The advantage is that you are able to adjust the magnification to suit yourself. You can pass gradually from one magnification to another, without losing sight of the sample. What makes this type of instrument astounding is that increasing the magnification will make it appear as though you are “diving into” the sample. The first time you do this, it will take your breath away. Read the rest of the article »

We’ve featured a lot of macro stuff here on Photocritic before. Most of it has been focused around taking macro photos with an SLR camera. But what do you do when you don’t have an SLR? Are you out of luck? Not at all!

My friend Cameron kindly offered to write an introduction for Photocritic to what you can do if you have to use a compact digital camera for your macro photos… Read the rest of the article »

My new friend Yyoseph took some inspiration from the Photocritic Pringles Macro article, and then decided to do it better - instead of using an inflexible Pringles can, he decided to use method which essentially makes the extension tube and reversing mount telescopic, allowing for less or even more extreme macro photography. Wicked idea! Read the rest of the article »

Of all things when working with macro photography, light is the biggest problem. Of course, there are hordes of ways to solve it, but many of these ways are quite expensive.

The main problem is that you need to get really close, and your lens will get in the way of the light. As such, you would use a ring-flash. These can be clumsy and expensive, too.

Luckily there are other ways of doing things… Read the rest of the article »

There are quite a few photos on Flicr tagged with pringlesmacro now - in other words, photos done with our DIY macro-lens built out of a Pringles clan.

If you don’t use Flickr, you totally should. And if you do, why not tag your Pringles Macro photos so it gets added to that same gallery?

CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) is old news, but because it is, you can pick up broken CCTV cameras at next to no price. You could even get lucky by dumpster-diving! Read the rest of the article »

Hi everyone!

I recently stumbled across Professor Bikey Bike’s white peppercorn photo (and his other explorations into macro, taken with the Pringles macro extension tubes, featured here on Photocritic a couple of months ago.

The big question - I had a great time building that lens and creating the tutorial for it - but who else built one? And do you have your galleries on the internet? If you have, why not leave a comment here? In a couple of weeks, I’d love to run a story featuring some of the best Pringles can photos available on the internet.

After reading our extreme macro photography on a budget, quite a few of our readers were wondering how they can take their new-found obsessions further - what if you want to go more extreme? What if you aren’t on a shoestring budget? Read the rest of the article »

So, you like the idea of doing macro photography, but you think you can’t afford it? Think again - with less than £1 worth of equipment, a little bit of sweat and tears (and blood, if you, like me, are a bit on the clumsy side), and you can build yourself a surprisingly good macro lens. Don’t believe me? Well, have a look at the article, and think again!

Of course, as I’m using a Pringles can to make this lens, you also have the opportunity to pause for a snack. Now that’s the type of DIY projects I like. Read the rest of the article »