High Magnification Ultraviolet Photography – Pollen Grains – Watch on YouTube
Pollen is very interesting up close, but we’re taking it to the next level with some high Magnification ultraviolet photography! UV photography and high magnification macro are both amazing alone, but combined they are sure to create some other-worldly effects!
Pollen Macro Photography
This article follows on from our previous exploration into pollen, using 5x and 10x magnification lenses from Laowa. If you haven’t seen that tutorial yet, it might be useful to check it out first.
We’re going to be using the same Laowa lenses to capture images of the same flower, but this time, in ultraviolet.
It’s not as complicated as it seems and it can add another dimension to your macro photography!
UVIVF Macro Photography
UVIVF stands for Ultraviolet Induced Visible Florescence. This is a phenomena where a subject, in this case our flower, absorbs UV light and re-emmits it as visible light.
UV is Invisible and would require a converted camera to be able to capture. However with UVIVF Photography, we can use a long exposure to capture small amounts of visible light created by the UV.
This means you don’t need a special camera in order to try this type of UV Photography!
Lighting for UVIVF Photography
Something that is required, is special lighting. It’s important to use pure UV light for your light source as the amount of visible light can be easily be overpowered by anything created by the light source or environment.
We have made this easy with our UV Lighting Arms. You only need a couple of these and a dark environment to re-create the shots you see in this article.
We have a wealth of articles covering the exact method used, check out our introduction to UVIVF Photography Article to learn more and see some other subjects glow!
High Magnification Ultraviolet Photography
When combining UVIVF with High magnification macro photography, there are a few extra steps and considerations. Firstly, high magnification macro at 5x and upwards can be prone to a lot of camera shake. This is already an issue to overcome in UVIVF as long exposures make any movement of the camera a problem.
Combine long exposures and high magnification and any tiny movement during the capture will ruin your shot.
The next issue is focus stacking. It’s pretty much mandatory to get any kind of recognisable shot as the Depth of field from high power macro lenses is tiny. This compounds the issue of bad shots from camera shake… ruin one, and ruin a whole stack!
We recommend having a very stable setup with no vibration or movement. Long exposure times are not an issue if you can keep everything still! It’s still a very time-consuming exercise, but the results can look amazing when everything starts to glow!
We’re going to be exploring super macro photograph with the Aurogon lenses more in the future, so please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more macro photography tutorials, ideas and inspiration!
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