Learn all secrets, techniques and skills to master macro photography

Macro photography is pure fantasy and flexibility. You don’t even have to leave home, you can take amazing shots from your study or kitchen, all you need is an idea.

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Introduction

Thanks to beautiful images, online and on magazines, many people fell in love with macro photography. An endless range of subjects from insects and plants to everyday items. Most important you don’t have to travel around the world to take a beautiful picture, in macro photography you can find a perfect subject in your backyard, kitchen or desk. Macro photography reveals an unknown world of details, patterns and colours hidden from us, only using the right equipment and mastering macro photography skills you can discover this wonderland. In this blog I will teach you everything you need to know to take amazing pictures, and all the secrets behind the best images you see online and famous magazines.

What is macro?

Macro photography is close-up photography of subjects. You take macro pictures when you are magnifying your subject sufficiently to reach a magnification (1 to 1) of “life size” or greater (2 to 1, 3 to 1 etc.). Essentially it means that your subject size is the same on your camera sensor as its real life size, and, it fills the whole frame. For example, if you photograph a 1 inch-long insect, the insect would need to be 1 inch long on your camera sensor (regardless of the size of your camera sensor).

Technically speaking, macro photography involves different category, it includes true macro photos, but also general close-up images. If you take a picture of a beautiful insect with high magnification but below a 1 to 1 ratio, it is, technically speaking, considered a close-up photo, while if you take a picture of the same subject with a 1 to 1 ratio or higher, than it is considered a true macro photo.

Magnification

As we said before, in order to take a true macro photo or at least a close-up photo, we need to achieve a certain magnification of the subject. By comparing the subject real-life size and its size on the camera sensor, we obtain a magnification ratio. For example, if the subject is 2 cm tall in real life and, on the camera sensor will take 2 cm in height (regardless of the size of your camera sensor), than the ratio will be 1 to 1 and we took a true macro photo. If the same subject will only take 1 cm in height on the camera sensor, than the ratio will be 1 to 2, and we achieved a close-up photo.

When buying a macro lens the minimum requirement is to be able to reach a magnification 1 to 2, anyway if you can, always aim at a lens capable to produce a 1 to 1 magnification. Anything below 1 to 2 is not considered macro, and manufactures only use it for marketing purposes, that’s why is very important to understand what magnification is.

Personally, I suggest a 1:1 magnification prime lens at least 100mm for example, the Tokina 100mm f/2.8 AT-X PRO. It is a great lens for a cheap price. Otherwise, the Nikon 200mm f/4 AF-D Macro AF-MICRO NIKKOR is the best Nikon prime lens option for macro photography.

Working distance and depth of field

The working distance is the distance between the front of your lens and the subject you are shooting. The higher is the focal length, the higher is the working distance. For example, a 200mm lens has much higher working distance than a 60mm lens. Obviously, a 200mm lens is much more expensive than a 60mm lens, so when buying a lens, you should consider what is the purpose of the lens and what are you going to mainly shoot.

If you are planning to shoot still subjects or in a controlled environment (such as a studio), then the working distance is not a huge problem for you as you can control light, the subject and you can take out of the equation many problems that you would face on the field. On the other hand, if you are planning to shoot outdoor then, the working distance is something you must consider before buying a new lens. Something with a low working distance, such as a 60mm lens, will force you to get very close to your subject, which means that if you are shooting an insect, most probably you will scare it and make fly away, or if you are shooting a flower, a piece of wood or anything else you will get so close to the subject to block the light and, you will be forced to use a flash. In these cases, a lens with a higher working distance will place you in a safe zone. You won’t scare your subject, you will get natural light and you will have greater flexibility to compose your picture.

Getting very close to your subject raises another common problem in macro photography, the shallow depth of field. The depth of field is the distance between the closest and farthest point that are in focus in an image.

In the picture above you can see how shallow is the depth of field, as only the from duck is in focus, while the rest are blurry.

As we said before to achieve a high magnification we have to get very close to our subject but, this will produce a very shallow depth of field (few millimetres), meaning, just a small portion of our subject will be in focus. To increase the depth of field in these situations we can use a smaller aperture (f-7 or higher), and compensate the light using a flash or increasing the shutter speed. In studio we also have the option of taking multiple pictures of a still subject, changing the focusing area in each one of them and stack all pictures together with an editing software to produce 1 single image with all areas perfectly in focus, (Focus stacking). In real life, when on the field, this is much more difficult to achieve, as the subject will move making focus stacking almost impossible. For example, think at a bee flying from flower to flower, do you think you can take 30 pictures of that bee on the same flower, in the same position while the bee doesn’t move? No way! This is another reason to buy a macro lens with a higher focal length, it allows you to stay farthest away from your subject giving you more depth of field. Anyway, if you don’t have the budget for a higher focal length lens, you can buy extension tubes for your 60mm macro lens. We will talk later in this article about extension tubes and other macro accessories.

There are 3 factors that affect the depth of field:

• Focal length of your lens. The wider is the lens the more depth of field you will have, on the other hand the more you zoom into the subject or, the higher is the focal length, the less depth of field you will have. So, if you place a subject at a certain distance and you set the camera with the same parameters, you will have more depth of field with a wide angle lens rather than with a telephoto lens.
• The distance between your lens and the subject. The less is the distance between the lens and the subject the less depth of field you will have.
• The aperture of your lens. Large aperture (small f-stop number, such as f-1.8) will produce a shallow depth of field. When taking a portrait, and you want to blur the background, you use large aperture. On the other hand, if you want to capture all the details of the background you use a small aperture (ex. f-7).

When on the Internet you see those beautiful pictures of insects or flowers, where the whole subject (and in general the whole frame) is in focus, 90% of the time it was taken in studio. If you are like me and, you like to go out in a park, most of the time you have to sacrifice focus and work on composition and creativity. Both approach to macro photography are welcome, sometimes is nice to stay at home, prepare your subject, the background, study the composition, prepare your equipment, shoot relax and enjoy macro photography.

Understand focusing in macro photography

Earlier in this article we briefly talked about macro lenses, we said that their main advantage is to be able to focus even when they are very close to the subject (focusing distance). This particular “skill” is the main reason we buy them. In macro photography we want to get very close to the subject to achieve the higher possible magnification but, getting so close to the subject also implies that focusing becomes one of the most challenging aspect of macro photography. Auto focus will not work properly, even if you have the newest and best DSLR or mirrorless camera, in macro photography you must manually focus your subject. The best way to do it, is to place your camera on a steady tripod and use the live view mode, zoom in and check on the display that the part of your subject you want in focus is properly focused. I strongly advise you to use a remote control to take your picture, as you pressing the shutter release button will slightly shake your camera affecting focus and sharpness of your image. Alternately you can set a shutter delay of 5 or 10 seconds (enough time for the camera to recover from the vibration caused by you pressing the shutter release button), but it is quite frustrating, and you could risk losing the right moment to take the picture. Moreover, a third-party controller is very cheap, and you can buy it for less than £20.

In order to take beautiful macro pictures, we need to learn how to master focusing technique in these harsh conditions.

To make the situation even more difficult, we have to face another problem, the light. When taking macro pictures, we always have to work in low light condition due to:

• The aperture settings. To compensate the shallow depth of field, due to the short distance between the lens and the subject, we usually set the aperture at f-7, f-11 or lower (sometimes as much as the lens allows us) so, despite the sunny day we still need extra light, usually provided by 1 or more flashes, ideally equipped with diffusers to evenly spread the light around the subject.
• Using a lens with a short focal length (ex. 60mm), will physically prevent the subject to receive enough natural light, due to the close distance between the lens and the subject.

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