Macro photography is a great way to make impressive photographs and to look at the world from a new perspective. It’s also pretty easy to do with just about any camera.
What is macro photography?
Macro photography is a form of extreme close-up photography. Using this style makes objects in the photo appear larger than life. There are a couple of key elements to effective macro photography:
- Focal length
- Being “tack sharp”
- F-stop
Experimenting with these three variables can make for some amazing photos.
Getting the pictures you want
Focal length basically determines how zoomed-in or close to your subject your photo is. The larger the number, the more zoomed-in your photo is. The smaller the number, the wider your photo is. As a rule of thumb, the more of your subject you want to show, the smaller the number you’ll probably want to use. But the bigger you want to make a small subject look, the larger the number you’ll want to use.
Tack sharpness simply means making sure your camera and your subject don’t move when you take your photo. If either is moving, your photo can end up blurred or slightly out of focus. This is most obvious in close-up photography, particularly macro photography. There are two things you need to keep your photo tack sharp:
- Get a tripod.
- Do not even think of touching your shutter button.
When it comes to tripods, I won’t recommend any specific equipment—even the least expensive tripod is better than nothing at all. Just make sure whatever you buy is sturdy and can support the weight of your camera and lens.
So why not use the shutter button? If you touch the camera, you’re moving the camera. If you’re moving the camera, you aren’t going to get tack-sharp photos. To avoid using the shutter button, all you need is a remote shutter control. All camera makers have some type of remote shutter, either wired or wireless. For my Sony cameras I still use the RM-L1AM. It’s inexpensive and works with all of the Sony cameras I’ve bought to date.
Sony RM-L1AM remote shutter control.
If you have a point-and-shoot model, all is not lost. Even the iPhone Camera has a delay timer. In a pinch you can set a five-second delay so that once you press the shutter button you can get your hand away from the camera, allowing it to remain stable for the photo.
Finally, I left the last tip until last because it can cause the most frustration when learning macro photography: leveraging your aperture, or f-stop. The f-stop controls how much light reaches your camera’s sensor. A low number means the aperture is wider and allows more light in. A high number means the aperture is smaller and lets less light in. A high number also means more of the scene—from your subject to the background—will be in focus.
If you are trying to get a tight focus on an object and there is little or nothing behind it, try f/22. If there are items in the background that will get into your photo, consider a lower aperture to make those fade away.
In this set of photos you can see the effect a low f-stop can have. The background almost completely washes away when mixed with a longer focal length.
But a long focal length—a really long lens—isn’t always a requirement. In these photos I couldn’t use a larger lens, but the lower focal length and lower f-stop both have a profound and dramatic impact on the results.
The most important thing is to get out, experiment, and have fun. You will always discover something new and surprise yourself the more you experiment.