Hello from Ohio, USA

[H3AdBaBY]

Hello everyone,

 

My name is John, I'm a graphic designer and photographer from Stow, Ohio, USA.

 

I experimented with Infrared B&W film in the late ‘70’s but it wasn’t until I got my first digital DSLR that I resumed photographing in Infrared. Using an optically opaque lIR lens filter was an exercise in frustration and eventually I obtained a Nikon D70 converted to 830nm. I’ve since become interested in UV photography and just recently converted another D70 to Full Spectrum.

 

The past several years I’ve been very with a major house renovation. Doing 90% of the work myself has left very little time for photography but late this year I began capturing macro photos of the insects in my garden and posting them to Instagram  https://www.instagram.com/john_david_fawcett/

As a result of my fascination with insects and knowing they see an oftentimes much different world than humans I decided to try and incorporate “bug vision” into my macro photos. I began researching “bee vision” and UVIVF photography and quickly ended up on this site.

 

So far I've only begun initial testing with the full spectrum camera. I still need to adjust the focus, and I’m researching UV light sources. So far I’ve taken a few shots outdoors at dusk and a few with a “black light” flashlight. Unfortunately the flashlight emits a fair amount of visible purple light along with the UV but it was still a fun experiment.

 

I have much to learn so I’d best get to reading all the forum posts. I’m sure I’ll even have a silly question or two but hopefully I’ll end up with some photos to share with everyone.

 

Carpe Diem!

[nfoto]

Welcome to UVP. Glad you made the journey .... "Silly questions" ??? never heard of them. Only silly answers and they are notably absent from our friendly site.

[dabateman]

Welcome to the club. 

I say many silly things.

I hope I can help you get the vision you're after. 

 

[Guest]

Headbaby,

 

Well, here's to silly screen names. I like the landscape photo. It's a familiar terrain. Though, almost treading on beer vision. 

 

Cheers,

 

B1

[H3AdBaBY]

Haha! Yeah, you’ve got a point. I’ve been using that name since before the World Wide Web became common. As for the focus issue, yes, that’s the next challenge to overcome. I removed the hot mirror and of course the focus shifted. I was eager to see what the images looked like from a full spectrum camera so I went for a hike after work. Unfortunately the sun had just about set so there wasn’t much UV/IR light left but there was enough that I could see the difference. I was also shooting hand-held at about 1/30th of a second while in the middle of a suspension bridge so that didn’t help image quality at all.

[Doug A]

Welcome to the forum. You triumphed over difficult conditions and captured an excellent image. Looking forward to hearing and seeing more.

Thanks for sharing,

Doug A

[Guest]

By the way, your instagram insect photos are really good. What lens, lighting and camera did you use for those shots?

[Nate]

Welcome to forum. I'm a beginner too, the best info you'll find is right here. Awesome shots you've done.

[lukaszgryglicki]

Hi, welcome to the forum, have a great fun here!

 

[Andy Perrin]

I love your insect macro shots! We have relatively few photos OF insects here and it would be cool if you also continued your macro shots in IR and UV. 

[H3AdBaBY]

Thank you! 

On 10/28/2021 at 8:30 PM, Blazer0ne said:

By the way, your instagram insect photos are really good. What lens, lighting and camera did you use for those shots?

Thank you! I’ve enjoyed photographing some of the amazing creatures I’m come across. I’m really disappointed that the insects had disappeared with the imminent onset of winter, although I am looking forward to snowflake photography. In the meantime, I want to learn all I can about UV photography so I’m ready next spring.

For normal visible light macro photography I am using a Nikon D7200 with a Nikkor 40mm f1.8 micro lens and an off-camera Nikon SB-800 speedlight with a CygnusTech diffuser. I’m currently doing my preliminary culling, rating, and RAW processing in RAW Power and then finishing the image with Affinity Photo, all on an iPad Pro, complete with the Magic Keyboard, a Magic Mouse II, and a Pencil.  I archive my images on a Western Digital RAID and I also use iCloud storage.

Earlier this year my ten year old MacBook Pro suddenly refused to start up. At that point I was forced into using my iPad Pro as my workstation. There were a few hurdles early on but I've overcome them all and I no longer have plans to replace the old MacBook, although I do look longingly at the new MacBooks Pros that were just released.

One of the first hurdles I encountered was finding a replacement for Adobe Lightroom. In my opinion, the iOS version of Lightroom Mobile is in no way comparable to the desktop version. I was going from a full-featured professional tool to an app that felt like it was an afterthought - something Adobe just threw together to have a presence in the App Store.

After a good bit of research and trying different apps I finally found a workflow that suites me. I now use RAW Power for my culling, rating, and RAW processing. RAW Power is an iOS and MacOS program created by the former lead developer for Apple's Aperture and in my workflow fills the role formerly occupied by Lightroom. Although it is not yet quite as full-featured as Lightroom I find I prefer the more streamlined approach. I can do all my RAW processing in RAW Power and then do more extensive editing by simply opening the file in Affinity Photo. This is analogous to using Lightroom and opening the image in Photoshop. Same thing only better. My opinion of course.

I’ve found the current versions of Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad leave quite a bit to be desired. With photo editing in mind, I purchased my iPad Pro in 2018 primarily due to the promises from Adobe that Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad were "coming soon". Nearly four years later I'm done waiting. There are much better options available at a much lower cost. For me, that translates into better images, and breaking free of the monthly subscription seriously improves my photography budget.

And FWIW, although I am currently obsessed with UV photography I have a few of my Infrared photos at. https://www.treetoes.com/Infrared/

 

 

[Guest]

Infrared is just as popular here. They should have rebranded this site as full spectrum photography dot com. 
 

You will be surprised just how snappy the lower cost M1 macs are. No need for a pro machine anymore.
 

If you are looking for an even better bargain and a MS Windows machine then look no further than the Ryzen chipset. An HP laptop with 5000 series chipset can be had for less than $500.

 

It’s all about memory bandwidth or ram on the die these days. So you

can get away with less ram too.