What is macro photography - Tips for macro photography

Thinking small for a big impact with macro photography.

Delve into the world of macro photography for tips on how to best make tiny subjects larger than life.

Fire ants on the prowl captured in a macro photograph

Photography is always a matter of perspective. Who’s your subject and where are you shooting them? What’s the lighting like and how might that affect the shot? Are you shooting from above or below? Is the subject on the move or are you moving as you find the right angle on a stationary landscape? And then you can get into the gear-related questions. Are you shooting with a prime lens or from a distance with a telescopic lens? Or is this a live event and do you need to come prepared to use a few lenses?

“It’s an alien world when you get into the macro level.”

Asking yourself these questions and thinking through the logistics are skills you want to build as a budding photographer. But that need is magnified, literally, when you’re changing your perspective to work on the very small level of macro photography — shooting bugs and other small items that live in a world apart from most photos you’ll shoot. “It’s an alien world when you get into the macro level,” says photographer and teacher Ben Long.

 

Prepare for a journey into the unknown.

What is macro photography?

Macro photography is all about showcasing a subject larger than it is in real life — an extreme close-up of something small.

A full-frame insect in a five-by-seven-inch photo and a four-inch product shot of a cornflake go well above life-size: both are examples of macro photography. (And while this premise would apply to photos taken through a microscope, that goes beyond the realm of macro into photomicrography or photos of the microscopic.)

In macro photography, the world you know is gone and a new one emerges.

 

“A really great place to start is to work your way through the refrigerator,” Long suggests. “Berries are fascinating when you get in really close. There are really cool textures — they’ve got hair on them. I shot a cornflake at some ridiculous level of magnification and it looked like either a really gross piece of meat or the surface of Mar.s.”

 

As with all photography, exploration is what fuels your ability to understand what you are looking for in your photos. The more you delve into this new, mysterious world, the more you’ll know what you want to document.

“I think the hardest thing about macro photography is actually previsualisation — learning to recognise what a good macro subject might be.”

Macro photography tips.

First things first, before any macro photography advice will be useful, you’ll need a macro lens. While most lenses shoot at a ratio of 1:2.8 and greater, macro lenses shoot at a 1:1 ratio and can focus only within the macro range of about 12 inches or fewer — essential for the super-sharp focus needed to make the minuscule larger than life.

Tiny figurines, photographed in macro, playfully posed on a book

With that purchase made, here are some things to think about as you begin to shoot at a macro level:

 

Quick note: If you want to experiment before investing in a dedicated macro lens with a focal length better suited to the style, you can get a reversing ring for a fraction of the cost. This allows you to mount a regular lens backward on your camera to create a macro effect.

 

1. Keep your eye on the details.

As you move closer to any object, the fine details and tiny imperfections that are invisible from a distance become clear. When you’re magnifying as much as you will in macro photography, you may be looking at stray hairs that appear as big as pool noodles. 

 

Long explains. “You’ve got to clean like crazy. And if it’s something fragile, you can’t just get a can of compressed air and blow it. You’ve got to get in with tweezers and little brushes to try to clean everything off.”

 

2. Plan what you want to capture.

“Macro photography is dependant on the photographer and what it is that they want to enlarge for people to see,” photographer Stephen Klise says.

 

Working with smaller subjects means your depth of field shrinks, making it very important to go into macro shoots with a plan for what photos you want to get. “When you’re working with macro photography, you have such a narrow plane of focus that little adjustments will throw the whole thing right off,” Klise says. “It takes a lot of time and a lot of careful planning.”

Beautiful macro shot of a wasp perching on a flower petal