Product Photography for Macro Photographers

Greetings everyone,

My apologies in advance for what will be a perfunctory post today. There is much to be done for the coming week and there are still a number of important side-projects that need to be attended to. So I will get straight into today’s business. The theme for this week is “Product Photography”, a discipline with which macro photography has much in common. I have always found this type of photography especially satisfying. It is extremely demanding, requires a great deal of precision and attention to detail, and is probably the best way to learn lighting for macro photography. It is also one of the few ways, other than teaching, that I have actually earned some income over the years. And, of course, it will soon be gone forever.

This type of technical photography has been one of the prime targets for automation and standardization. Much of the day-to-day product photography, the bulk cataloging of a business’ line of goods, the pack shots, is already being taken over by clever automated systems that can produce decent pack shots quickly and with relatively little human intervention. But this is not where the product photographer makes her money. That is from the  creative “hero” shots, the images that are designed to sell a product by creating a  legend around the product, by telling a compelling story, and by making the product look bigger, better, faster, more desirable than the competition. The problem for product photographers is that they no longer need to spend a week photographing the latest Mercedes sport coupe, in fact, they don’t have to photograph it at all. A robot at the factory has already captured thousands of hi-resolution images to create a stunningly detailed 3-dimensional model of the car. The manufacturer can, with a few keystrokes, put the car on a Tuscan hilltop, or on the streets of Atlanta, it can change the color of the paint and the  style of upholstery, They can fill the car with beautiful people, or show it driving autonomously. This is not something we might expect to see within the coming decade - it is already here - and the top end product photographer has already begun to feel his relevance starting to fade as computational image-making becomes more and more capable with every passing week.

I think this is a real shame, of course, because I like to create interesting and creative product photographs, but that is not the main reason. The primary concern that I have is that as some of these technical disciplines are taken over by machines, photographers will forget how this sort of work is done, and we will no longer think it is worth teaching - and that will be a great loss. Product photography requires an attention to detail that is not seen in most other areas of picture making. Products must wow the audience while being tru to life in the tiniest fdetails. The images must touch something in the viewer and get them excited about the product. The images, to be reproduced on billboards, in movie theaters, magazines, and on the internet must be color perfect wherever they are seen. Learning how to photograph a product in the studio is one of the best ways I have found to teach lighting at the macro scale. When we learn how to develop a workflow when using multiple off-camera flash sources, or how to use a tilt/shift lens, or design a table-top composition that can sell a $20,000 watch, we are learning how to take full control of the entire studio environment. To really learn product photography you learn how to control all the ambient light, eliminate reflections and vibrations, use bounce cards, mirrors, flags, and snoots, along with filters, gels, and polarizers. I would go so far as to say that almost every skill that I have acquired in the studio, has been informed in some way or another but lessons learned in product photography.

And that is why I want to spend a couple of days this week talking about what we can take from product photography to use in our macro practices. On Tuesday (my birthday!) we will take a closer look at product photography and talk about some of the most valuable lessons that we can learn from this discipline. That will be the subject for Macro Talk at 8PM central time on Tuesday, October 7th. Here is your link to the dicussion…https://youtube.com/live/OReNvjtb3s0?feature=share

On Thursday I am going to bring the discussion down to earth by giving you a series of tips and techniques that you can use today. I’m doing this, of course, because of this months competition theme - “Product Photography”. It occurred to be, after I announced the theme that some of you may not know exactly what we are looking for. So, in MacroTalk Too (2PM Central Time, on October 9th, 2025), I will tell you everything you need to know t create a believable product photograph that you can enter for the competition. The livestream can be found by following this link … https://youtube.com/live/7v7kIJMrOW4?feature=share

By the way, my guest judge for the October contest is none other than last month’s winner, Graham Carey! I am so glad to have the chance to work with Graham, who is not only a lovely chap, but also a brilliant inventor, skilled “maker” and, of course, one of the most exciting macro photographers I know. Having Graham join me to make the “results video” and discuss all the entries is going to be a lot of fun, and probably very educational for me, but it also has a less obvious bonus for you. As a judge, Graham will not be competing in the October competition - do you see my point? You may never get a better opportunity to join our list of elite photographers! So come on Thursday, and get what you need to make it the winner’s circle at the end of the month!

No sooner is MTT over that it will be time to turn to the strangely addictive world of crystal photography and our third episode of Crystal Art - a group of photographers who share a common interest in finding, growing, and photographing birefringent crystals under cross polarization. This may sound like a weirdly narrow field, which I suppose it is, but it is also a great deal of fun. We have a fantastic group, led by my good friend Harold Hall (and his protege… me!). It is a new group but we are off to a great start and this Friday is shaping up to be a lot of fun. I have asked  Harold to give us a little introduction, telling us where his interest in crystal imaging came from and about his experience, going from professional travel photography to the mysterious world of Crystal Art. I have several pictures and some video footage to share, and if time permits I want to tell you about one chemical combination that I have encountered that demonstrates some seriously odd behavior. That is all in Crystal Art, which happens at 2PM Central Time over on YouTube, and which is completely free - if you want to come, here is your invitation…

Allan Walls is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Allan Walls’ Crystal Art with Harold Hall

Time: Oct 10, 2025 02:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6916802815?pwd=TS9tZi9ZL1NXeVUvOUF4eTg5YjdlZz09&omn=85985086386

Meeting ID: 691 680 2815

Passcode: 678122

Join instructions

https://us02web.zoom.us/meetings/85985086386/invitations?signature=d4O3aDUc63hAJttn9obUZ0o7O-fhliCjnjbr9kcRpMM

After that it is back to our regular schedule on Saturday with another Pzoom meeting. This is a Patreon Only event that I do every other Saturday, and it is one of the ways I say thankyou to my Patreon supporters. The weekend I will be bringing some content that I have been working on for quite some time now - how (and why) to buy a microscope in 2025. That will be after we have all our usual activities. So if you want to give an update, ask a question, show off some work, or get some feedback, let me know on Saturday and I will make sure you get as much time as you need. If you would like to know more about Patreon and about how you can support my channel, please visit www.patreon.com/allanwallsphotography. For my Patreon friends - your link for the Pzoom on Saturday will be posted on Patreon later today.

Anyone waiting for the Microscope Focus Block Conversion / Crystal Polarizer Photography price lists, please bear with me a little longer. I did complete the lists but wanted to get a couple of my friends to look them over before sending them out.

Summer is drawing to a close in Middle Earth and I have had precious little time to spend in Nature this year. But I plan to remedy that this weekend. We have rain forecast for the next few days with nicer weather by the weekend. I plan to be crawling along the forest floor with magnifying glass in hand, in search of slime mold fruiting bodies. I can’t wait! If any of you live near here (Peoria in Illinois) and would care to join me for a few hours of myxomycetal exploration, let me know.

That’s all I have time for today and I hope to see you at one or more of this week’s events!

Allan

PS   I have been meaning to mention that I spent a good part of last week working out the optimal design of a lens hood that is for use with Mitutoyo M-Plan microscope objectives. I have subsequently made sets of these optimized lens hoods for the 5X, 10X, 20X, 50X, and 100X objectives, and which come in a matching box, designed specifically for these hoods.

M-Plan APO objective hoods

The bottom half of the case for the M-Plan objectives

The pictures show the hoods and the bottom half of the custom case. I am getting a few people to test these prototypes and may be making the sets available for sale in the coming months. If you want to get on the list for a set, use the Walls-app.com messaging center to give me your full name, email and mailing addresses. If I decide to sell these sets, they will be sold on a first come, first served basis. I have not thought about a price yet, but I will put the information on my website and contact anyone who signs up on the list, as soon as  the beta testing is done. Each set take 12 hours to print (the sizing has to be perfect to stay in the tiny sweet spot between too much and too little light) and each hood is hand-painted with high end ultra black 3.0 paint.

See you soon,

Allan

The Objective Lens Hood

Another week is upon us, and this is going to be another busy one. I am going to get right into  the meat of this week’s post and will put all the invitations and scheduling announcements at the end of this article. That is partly because I need to get all this stuff out of my head before it explodes and partly because I want you to read this first part. And why is that? It is because it falls in the category of “one of those things somebody should have told me about when I was little, but didn’t”, and it pertains to optics.

Under the civic center - Mobile, AL

Optics is a scientific discipline, sort of. It concerns itself with the behavior of a relatively narrow band of electromagnetic wavelengths and could, in some circumstances, be confused with some sort of physics. The reality is less clear. Let us say, for the moment, that you want to understand the inner workings of your Nikon D850. You would unquestionably be in a better position to grasp the arcane mechanisms of the mirror assembly, or the instantaneous precision of the autofocus firmware, if you were the holder of a doctorate-level degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or both. But to understand optics at a correspondingly advanced level, you should know several good card tricks, have read most of Douglas Adams, get right at least half the answers to the London Times’ Cryptic Crossword every day, and be willing to concede that Flat Earthers may be onto something. An advanced degree may come in handy from time to time, but isn’t mandatory.

A lighthouse in winter

On that basis, I consider myself 75%-qualified to talk, in vague generalities, about the use of microscope objective lens hoods in macro photography. I have decided to wade into this treacherous quagmire of quasi-optical speculation, random approximation, and dubious formulae, for one sole reason - because I have just spent three days trying to figure out the truth of objective lens hoods and misery loves company.

20X hood in action

If you are a macro photographer and fortunate enough to find yourself the owner-operator of a 3D printing machine, then you have already, or soon will, attempt to print a lens hood for a microscope objective. You will do this because you heard someone like me extolling the virtues of such an accessory, while tossing out terms like, “off-axis light”. “Cone of acceptance”, and “numeric aperture. In all likelihood you will design your lens hood lot look pretty similar to ones you have seen on YouTube, and give little or no thought to trivial considerations like, “how big should the hole be?” Or “how long should I make this thing?”. I know this because that is how I came up with my last ten hood designs.

5-100X

But this time it was different. I was asked by a friend to print up a full set of Mitutoyo M-Plan objective hoods, a matched set for the 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x, and 100x apochromats. I am usually asked to make a hood for a single objective, usually a 5x or 10x, and under those circumstances my “that looks about right” approach to hood design seemed sufficient. This was a different matter and it got me thinking about the physical characteristics of a properly designed hood.

5X prototype

What, for example, is the purpose of an objective hood? The hood is used to prevent light that is not needed to form the image of our subject from entering the lens. The idea is to block ANY light that doesn’t belong in the optical train and therefor does not contribute to the photograph, from entering the lens, while also ensuring that NONE of the light that does form the image is prevented from doing so, Why? When this off-axis light does make it into the lens it will bounce around, willy-nilly, eventually interfering with the light that forms  the image and and diluting its contrast to leave a soft and slightly blurry picture at the sensor.

It should not take a Feynman-sized leap to appreciate that designing a system that is described by a term like, “just enough to cause A, without causing B”, requires that we find the precise coordinates at which these conditions are met. We should begin, then, by identifying and defining our goals and I would propose three:

1. To create an obstruction to the passage of all off-axis light

2. To ensure that #1 does not impinge on any “image light”, while also ensuring that

3. There is sufficient physical space to properly light the subject.

20X with no hood

Examining these basic ideas we can quickly see that the factors influencing the ideal size and accurate positioning of the hole in the lens hood include the Numeric Aperture (NA), which defines the “cone of acceptance” and the size and position of the hood’s opening in relation to the lens and the subject.

No lens hood with axial lighting

When we are in “object space” (in front of the lens), a vignette forms when the material of the lens hood protrudes into the acceptance cone of light. The cone is defined by the NA of the objective. Assuming we are working in an air environment, we can further assume that the index of refraction, n is 1.0. The half angle of the light cone can be expressed:

ϴ = arcsin (NA)

The distance between the front element of the objective and the subject  is known as the working distance and this can be further subdivided into the distance between objective and lens hood aperture (the Standoff - or s) and distance from the hood opening and the subject, the Clearance, or c.. At distance “s” from the front of the lens, the radius of the marginal rays can be expressed:

Image Radius (r) = s x TAN(ϴ)

And from that we can determine the minimum size of the opening in the lens hood, at that plane, and we can write that as follows:

Diameter of opening (d) = 2 x s x TAN(ϴ)

It is recommended that we add a margin of 1.0mm to allow for any manufacturing or assembly inaccuracies, which we call “m”, making the formula:

D = 2 x s x TAN(ϴ) + m

As you can see, we need to decide on a value for “c” if we are to calculate the value for “s”. “C” is the amount of linear space you need to be able to light the subject. This is obviously a subjective matter, but I can tell you what I use for oblique lighting:

At 5X, c = 20mm

At 10X, c = 15mm

At 20X, c = 10mm

At 50X, c = 5mm, and

At 100X, c = 3mm

Now if we do all the math, this what we get:

mitutoyo hood dimensions

And that, in  a nutshell, is all you need to know to make a perfect set of lens hoods for your Mitutoyo… almost.

Other design considerations include the following:

1. make sure the “lip” of each hood sits right at “s” to preserve space for lighting

2. Keep wall thickness down to 1.5mm if possible - the wider the OD of the hood, the more light it will tend to block

3. Carefully flock the inside surfaces and use sprayed-on ultra black paint if you prefer

4. It is very hard to print an edge sharp enough to really avoid reflected light from the flat edge of the hood, so I print the hood aperture a little thicker and use gentle hand-sanding to reduce it to a knife-edge

5. Add a few internal baffles by making annular grooves 0.33mm deep and 0.6mm apart

6. Use only cool LEDs to prevent melting your hood.

7. Remember that your printed hoods will contract a tiny amount, so plan for this by increasing the diameter of the hood barrel by 0.2mm before adding a slip-fit tolerance - print test rings to make sure you have the size dialed in before printing a whole run of hoods.

early prototype with thick lipped aperture

Some other cool stuff I am working on include adding tiny magnets to the barrel of the hood, allowing for a looser fit, while holding the hood firmly on a vertical rig, and some other printing materials for “tighter” prints and a sharper annulus edge. I am also trying diffusers attached to the hood barrel for a compact and flexible final diffusion layer.

A final word of caution - if you ever use water/glycerine as a subject medium, be sure to recompute your ϴ as it will change with the new value for n.

One thing that really surprised me, though it should not have, was that the shape of each hood was significantly different at each iteration, and the size of the annulus seemed to be unrelated to any other variable and changed, it seemed, randomly with each new hood. This is, of course, because of the subjective assignment of Standoff to Clearance ratios at each NA. I have tested the hood for which I own an objective. Which is to say, you will need to do your own 50X and 100X evaluations (or lend me yours for the testing).

So there you have it - not only do you know how to make the perfect lens hood for any objective, but you also know why. And if that’s not worth a spirited “Bob’s yer uncle!”, then nothing is!

*************

Shall we take a look at what is in the works for the coming week? Tuesday kicks things off with an 8PM Macro Talk on YouTube, where the topic will be Macro Video. This is something I am getting more and more excited about and I want to tall you about what I have been up to in the realm of video and suggest a few things you might want to try to get a taste of this exciting discipline. https://youtube.com/live/ylenxujEDMI?feature=share

On Thursday at 2pm, Macro Talk Too will consider the Pause Paradox and how taking a break can be just the ticket for restoring our passion for, and reenergizing our progress in, macro photography. We have talked about this before, but in todays stream I am taking a very different approach and will suggest some very specific alternatives to macro photography that I have found to be particularly helpful as pathways to to improving your macro photography while, at the same time, taking a well earned break from it. These recommendations are going to surprise you! https://youtube.com/live/7YAGg5dnn8s?feature=share

On Saturday, at 10AM I will be meeting for two hours with my friends and supporters over on Patreon. I do this Zoom call (we call it a Pzoom) twice in the month  (and sometimes three times in the same month!) and it is a time for you to have my undivided attention for whatever you would like to do.

No two Pzoom meetings are the same - sometimes we will have a special guest but usually it is just us and we spend the time talking about photography, and anything else that needs our attention. I really enjoy this face to face meetings, where I get to hear what you have to say. My Patreon Supporters share their triumphs and their challenges, show off their incredible macro rigs, present their favorite images, all while picking up great tips and pointers from their fellow enthusiasts. It is a great opportunity to meet and get to know other talented people, discover new corners of closeup photography, give me welcomed feedback about our group and about the channel, and just relax around friends. I do these meetings as one of the ways I say thank you to the people who support my work. This channel and everything I do here could not exist without this wonderful group of women and men whose monthly contributions keep the doors open and the lights on. If you would like to  become part of the inner circle, please visit www.Patreon.com/allanwallsphotography to find out how.

Another one of my favorite things to do at the weekend is to hang out with my friends over at the Tangent - another Zoom get together where we talk about the thrilling world of 3D modeling and printing. A lot of our discussion focuses on how to use the awesome Fusion 360 CAD/CAM software to take ideas that exist only in our imaginations and turn them into real, working tools for our photographic adventures. If you have ever thought, “I wish someone would invent a thing that could do this for for me!”, then you owe it to yourself to join Tangent (Larry Strunk) and me, as we take you on a journey of discovery aboard HMS Fusion 360. It does not cost a penny and you don’t need to have a 3D printer to get a ton of useful information from the discussion. This all happens at 12:30 until 2:00pm, this Saturday. Your invitation is here… Allan Walls is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Allan Walls’ Tangent with Larry Strunk

Time: Sep 27, 2025 12:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6916802815?pwd=TS9tZi9ZL1NXeVUvOUF4eTg5YjdlZz09&omn=84839483744

Meeting ID: 691 680 2815

Passcode: 678122

Join instructions

https://us02web.zoom.us/meetings/84839483744/invitations?signature=KRKtgwWSl0Qs9VwHJs2YVKZid1n6QXmG7CMK2ngdoDE

A word (another word is more accurate) about microscope conversions and crystal viewers - I know that I am overdue in getting price lists to those of you who have enquired about purchasing one of these tools, and I do apologize for that, but I have been having a very hard time finding moments in which I am not working on active channel projects, or maintaining my aging infrastructure, or doing any of the  countless tasks that come with running a YouTube channel (even a very small one). But I am making progress and have the documents in review right now. As soon as they are ready to go I will publish them and send them to those who have made their interest known to me. One reason for the delay is that I am also using this opportunity to change a few long-standing practices here at the channel, and all that takes time. Please hang tight - it won’t be much longer.

And finally, one of those tasks that has kept me away for writing policy and price list documents has been preparing a video for release this week. In just a couple of days I will be publishing the incredible presentation made during last week’s Pzoom meeting by friend of the channel, Lester Lefkowitz, where he talks about Lightroom and his system for foolproof file management, and about a hundred other things - all pure Lester! It was a long and hugely entertaining meeting and I am going to share every moment of the event with you this week - you can expect to see the video released by Wednesday! Don’t miss it.

I had better get in high gear if all of this will be ready to go on schedule over the coming week. I hope to see you there!

Allan