Lighting a Brown-Lipped Snail with the Ianiro Pocket LED

Brown-lipped snail Cepaea nemoralis photographed with a Canon 90D, 100mm ƒ/2.8 L IS macro lens and lit with a the deminutive Ianiro Pocket LED.

As you see from the wide shot, the Ianiro Pocket LED creates a broad pool of soft light when used close to the subject. The light was mounted with a mini magic arm screwed to a PlatyPod Max. If you've not seen Platypod products, I urge you to take a look.

The snail shell is 18 mm across. The lens aperture was ƒ/14 - for more depth of field I should have stopped down to ƒ/20 or ƒ/22 and increased the ISO. Although grain/noise would increase, this can be reduced by processing with an app such as DxO PureRAW which is surprisingly effective.

Working so close to the snail with a macro lens on a camera with a 1.6x crop factor increased camera shake. As the aperture was so small, the shutter speed was in the region of 1/25 sec. At this level of magnification, photographing handheld is close to impossible due to up/down and backward/forward movement, so a tripod was essential.

As a comparison, I shot a few frames using the Pixapro MF12 macro flash. This unit has multiple 12 Ws mini flash heads attached to a ring surrounding the lens. Even though the light was diffused, it is still very harsh with short fall-off. The flash heads can be removed from the lens ring. I think that experimentation is required with the MF12 to get satisfactory results.

Disclosure

This post is not supported by any of the brands named herein. It is purely for educational and informational use.

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