Macro Photography Techniques

Having covered product photography during the last course, I learnt a few valuable techniques for this assignment.  But this time, I wanted to photograph the subjects using the Pentax DSLR and not rely so much on the Fujifilm S7000.  This combined with the subjects being natural and situated outside in the garden.

The first consideration was the light, which was not as controlled as when I was taking the product shots, because now I was photographing the subject outside the house, where I wanted to use the natural light, only using a reflector when necessary to illuminate any dark areas that I wanted lighter to show the detail, as opposed to using the studio lights in the Burton College photographic studio.

The next consideration was focusing.  The S7000 has a macro mode and a super macro mode, the latter of which can focus down to 25mm.  Although I do not own a proper macro lens, some of my lenses can focus down to 450mm.

So this meant that that I could not get as close to the subject, as I could with the S7000.  This meant zooming in closer.  With the Tamron 18 - 200 mm lens this zoom range was the whole 18 - 200 mm, where as with the Sigma 75 - 300 mm lens only the focal range of 200 - 300 mm was available for macro use.

Next, I chose a large aperture to concentrate the viewer on the subject, rather than the background.  Working at larger apertures kept the depth of field shallow, blurring out the background.

 

Proper macro lenses have a reproduction factor of 1:1, life size, other lenses which can be used for macro work sometimes do not offer this.  But to me if the image is to be printed so people can see it clearly I will accept this and not buy proper macro lenses which cost more and, like the tilt and shift lenses used for architectural photography, have their own specific uses.