First macro attempt!

[ChaoKuang]

I had to turn the flash on to get this shot. The little 'cubby' where we kept this piece was too dark. I like the effect the flash gave. What you're seeing is the top star of our paper christmas trees that we had at work. I thought it would be cool to photograph it up close. I have a hard time holding my hands steady, but was resting my arms on the shelf and that prevented blur, thankfully. I'm still trying to work on holding my hands steady in general...
But here's the shot. I thought it came out fairly well.

[FrankenPengie]

The flash did well up to the point where it blew out the exposure in that one spot. Something like a bit of copy paper in front of the flash would probably help. The top and left thingies need to be cropped out and the five dots could be cloned out. I'd like to have seen a little more down, or have removed the disk ornaments altogether and had a tighter shot.

Definitely a scene well worth experimenting with.

[wulf]

Find something to rest the camera on. A tripod is normally ideal (if it fits in the available space) but a stack of books or something will do as long as you take care not to knock it off. That will avoid any camera shake.

I am not sure how much control you have with your camera but you may also be able to use a much slower shutter speed and so capture the image without using flash, which blows out a lot of the detail.

Compare these two shots:



The difference is about 3.5 seconds, which is enough for the second one to look much brighter.

Wulf