Hi all,
So what is macro photography? Technically speaking, macro photography is creating a subject of at least 1:1 scale on your camera sensor. This means when the photo off the sensor is scaled up on a computer, it shows incredible details. Revealing these details that are invisible to the naked eye is fascinating and allows for boring subjects, such as a bottle of fairy liquid for example (below), to become something amazing.
Apart from the fact macro photography provides great eye candy, it also inspires and educates. Seeing things for the first time not only opens your eyes, it also provides you with knowledge and experiences that can be shared with other people. What do I mean by this? Personally for me, when I see something new through a macro lens it not only captivates me, but it also starts a learning process. Why does it look like that? Why is it behaving like that?
Take this macro picture of a Fly I took for example. Suddenly it isn’t just a ‘Fly’ anymore, but a fantastic piece of creation and engineering. Look at how the plates fit together. Why do the wings look like that? Every detail of this fly is like that for a reason, for survival, through evolution. It is an almost perfect machine. For me this helps inspire my design work as I can capture these new miniature feats of engineering in incredible detail and translate them though to my design work. I might use it for aesthetic inspiration, or even better, functional inspiration. My point is, you can use macro photography to gain NEW observations that can help build upon important things in your life and if you can share those experiences with other people, even better.
The great thing is macro photography does not have to be difficult to learn. You do not need to buy expensive lenses. All of my macro work is shot by reversing old prime lenses off eBay, which cost about £20. Here is a great article on macro shooting using reversed lenses.
For lighting, begin by just getting to grips with the basics, such as focal distances, aperture, exposure, all of which can be done well under direct sunlight. Then once you get confident with the basics, why not give Adaptalux a go?
I hope this post has inspired you to look into macro photography. I will be doing some video tutorials on macro photography using Adaptalux very soon. If you have any questions, post below and I will respond to them as soon as I can.
Thank you for reading this post and supporting Adaptalux,
Sam
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What len(s) do you use for your macro photography?
Hi Anthony,
I shoot with mostly reversed prime lenses off eBay that cost no more than £20. I also have a Tamron SP 90mm macro lens.
I am going to be publishing a new post next week showing the equipment I use for macro shooting.
Thanks