Another day out with the wonderful combination of Olympus E510 + ZD 50mm macro lens + ZD EC-20 2x teleconverter + Olympus Ring Flash.

This combo makes macrophotography a piece of cake – all you need do is find a subject, put exposure mode onto manual, select an aperture to give enough depth of field such as f/8 or f/11, select a shutter speed slower than 1/180th sec (you can adjust this to adjust degree of ambient background lighting you want instead of just getting a black background), set focus to manual and crank lens out using the focus ring until you get the desired magnification you need, then just move into your subject carefully until it appears in focus.

Olympus TTL flash will do the rest, although be warned, it needs to fire a pre-flash to determine exposure and this causes a bit of shutter lag.

• You can easily avoid this by changing the Flash mode to manual (just hit the mode button) and dial up a manual output (eg/ 1/16) and adjust this according to exposure results – for the same macro magnification, aperture and ISO, this manual output can remain constant. In manual mode you can also trigger additional flashes by optical triggers as there is no preflash to cause premature firing.

Here is a portrait of a butterfly today, no Photoshop, no cropping, just resized for the web:

you can see more of my butterfly pics from today here, including this fabulous butterfly mating:

my macro photos

oh….and a nice frog (without the 2x TC or the ring flash – hand held):