Getting liveview to work with the EOS450d and MP-E65

This morning I went on the pinternet mostly, reading more about photoshelter collection closing. Then I watched some more photoshop tutorial videos. After lunch I finished watching that set of photoshop tutorial videos, went on dpreview and read that the EOS5d MkII had finally been announced, and read some comments on the forums there and dpreview's preview of it.

In their preview they mentioned liveview, which made me remember that one of the reasons I got the 450d was because it had liveview, which should be useful in macro work. So I switched the camera on, and put it in liveview mode, but was greeted by just a black screen. I thought that maybe the flash connections were bad and that's why liveview wasn't working, so I disconnected the MT-24EX but it still wouldn't work. So I checked all the menu settings, and couldn't see anything that should be affecting it. Next I did some searching on the internet, but couldn't see anything apart from people saying it was great. I tried the camera again, and noticed there was an icon on the screen that said 'Exp Sim', went through all the camera settings again but couldn't see anything related to this. I thought that the screen must be so dark because Exposure Simulation mode is on, and the MP-E has quite a small effective aperture, and since I shoot at f/8 (effective aperture is actually much smaller than that) and 1/200s the camera must be making the screen black as that's how it thinks the exposure will look.

So I searched the pinternet for '450d turn off exposure simulation' to see if there was a way to turn it off, but couldn't find anything. I had a look in the 450d manual as well, but couldn't see anything there. So I switched the camera on again, and tried turning the mode dial to Aperture Priority mode, and Program Exposure mode the image brightened up nicely so you could see it, but would be nearly black in shutter priority mode and totally black in Manual mode. Well, this was better as it meant I could focus in A mode, then turn the dial to M mode to shoot, but it's likely that turning the dial would throw focus off a bit, so still not that great.

Next I tried re-attaching the flash, and setting it to E-TTL mode, in case with the camera in M mode it wanted to fire a pre-flash to check the exposure and would then simulate the exposure correctly and brighten up the screen. When I half pressed the shutter button the screen brightened up, yay! So I put the flash back in M mode, in a few seconds the screen went black again, so I half pressed the shutter again and the screen went bright again. So it seems all you have to do to get liveview working correctly with the 450d in manual mode is just press the shutter half way.

Still on the subject of macro shooting, yesterday I was shooting a bug on grass, the grass was waving about a bit, so I used the Wimberley Plamp on a tent peg to hold it steady. The first problem I had was the coloured background wouldn't fit behind the subject (a green lacewing) without bashing into the plamp or otherwise the bit of card coming off the camera holding the background would bash into the grass. What I needed was another plamp on a tent peg that could hold the background behind the grass. So that's something to add on my long list of extra photographic equipment to buy.

I also found the flash heads with mini-softboxes on were too large when shooting at high magnifications, so I took them off and shot without diffusion. I also lowered the f-stop to f/5.6 to avoid diffraction. The preview below looks quite rubbish and mushy for some reason, but you can see the highlight on the face to the right of the eye. So highlights are a problem without diffusion, but shooting at high magnification (this is at 5:1) they are a much smaller problem than they would be shooting at say 1:1 without diffusion. Shooting without diffusion also keeps the flash power low (and so faster), to minimise motion blur, which is important at high magnifications.
I was also dissapointed with how the eye has 2 bright points (the flash heads) while the rest is quite dark. This looks a bit weird to me.

The rest of the afternoon I went on the pinternet a bit (checked hotukdeals and my email) and then uploaded some pics to wildaboutbritain.co.uk, which actually takes quite a bit of time since I try and ID the pics myself first and have to try and get their size and resize them for the web, then upload them, and then add them to a forum post.

After dinner, finished uploading the pics to wildaboutbritain, checked my email and hotukdeals again, and then watched Battlestar Galactica and The Soviet Story with Mac.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Balls; cup o' tea.
Tenses: Pink wafer biscuit; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cob with peppered ham; 2x Hovis crackers with mature cheddar cheese; red grapes; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken and bacon pie; broccoli; peas; ½ baked potato. Pudding was tangerine/satsuma/similar orangey thing cheesecake. Coffee.