Macro Photography

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Quick Tips for Macro Photography

The great thing about Macro Photography is that you can do this from your living room at home, if necessary. Of course, you can, and should, go outdoors too and setup shots in a park or at the beach, but you can also setup shots indoors of everyday subjects and shoot them up close.

Think of an old watch, a flower or even some food items that could be shot on your kitchen table. The shapes, textures and colors come to life in the world of macro photography, but it can be tricky and fidgety.

Like any other aspect of photography, you need to understand how your camera works, and work within the limits of the equipment you have. Do you NEED to have a macro lens? In short, no. There are a few other cheaper options that you can experiment with before investing in a macro lens, such as focus stacking, close-up filters and extensions tubes. Also, your mobile phone camera and point-and-shoot digital cameras come with a surprisingly good macro mode.

The most important thing is to try this type of photography if you can. It will cause you to think creatively and to look for different things in your image setup. Give it a try and let’s see what you get.

Try this…

Set up your subject and get your camera in position. Look through the viewfinder and start working on your composition. Try some of these pointers to get started and work from there:

Work on building your composition – are there any curves, lines, shapes, textures, or colors that you want to emphasize?

Use manual focus to bring even a small part of your image into sharp focus, this will be your center of interest.

Make sure your center of interest is obvious. In other words, it should be in focus, it can be a different color to the rest of the frame, or it can even be a well-defined line or shape in the image

Check the exposure to make sure that you are exposing your scene correctly.

You can even overexpose slightly. In abstract macro photography, some slight overexposure is okay, as long as it does not distract from the rest of the image

Capture the shot

Try shooting the same image from a different angle and maybe even a different center of interest.

Take as many images as possible, from different angles, with different focal points.

Choose your best two or three images and edit them in your chosen image editing software.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and most of all having fun. ~ Mary Lou Cook

Be Blessed and be a blessing!

All Photographs in this post/blog © Cheryl Howard