Simple macro set up

One of the blogs I follow is strobist.com. Although I'm not into the sort of photography it is about it is thought provoking at times. Today's post made me think that the same simple improvisation might work for macro photography. So I gave it a try.

Luckily my 'wildflower meadow' is blooming and, depsite the rain, attracting insects - as well as frogs and voles. In a break in the rain I went bug hunting. The cool, damp conditions meant that what flies that were around were easily approachable. Unfortunately I forgot that the ISO performance of the D90 isn't what I've got used to, so there was more noise, and less detail, than I could have got. But it was only a testing session. Both the pictures below are cropped a bit.

In really close on a shiny fly the flash overdid things beyond the point of recovery on the computer. As a first try it worked well. I think that using one flash strapped to the lens hood, and another on a bracket, varying the output of each might work well. It might be a bit unwieldy though!

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