macro photography Archives - Nigel Hicks Photography

Close-up Photography

Nigel’s October 2021 online photography talk

In October’s online talk, Nigel covers many of the basic principles of close-up photography, explained in clear and unambiguous terms. Often also called macro photography, the subject covers the photography of both very close details and/or patterns in a host of subjects, and the photography of very small subjects. It is particularly widely used in wildlife photography, to enable the shooting of small animals and plants, such as butterflies, damselflies and many of the smaller wild flowers.

A recording of that talk is now available on You Tube, and can also be watched here. Just click on the start button below. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

The subject matter of close-up photography

The talk begins with a short introduction to the kinds of subject matter commonly shot in close-up photography. These range from detailed patterns in quite large subjects, down to small household objects, and all the way down to the tiniest animals and plants. Close-up photography techniques are commonly used to photograph butterflies, damselflies and other insects, as well as many flowers.

Some techniques and equipment explained: static subjects

The talk goes on to cover a range of basic techniques used in close-up photography, starting with the photography of static subjects.

Static objects such as flowers are usually shot with the camera on a tripod. With the camera inevitably close to the subject, focussing is critical, so a useful aid is a focussing rail. This is a track that fits between the tripod head and camera base that allows the camera to be slid forward and back over very small distances. It is a simple yet very useful little device.

Then there are the lenses. The fundamental problem for close-up photography is that you need to come really very close to your subject in order to get the necessary magnification. Unfortunately, this just isn’t possible using standard telephoto lenses as their minimum focussing distance – the shortest distance from lens to subject that they’re able to focus at – is too long. You need to be able to focus at a much shorter distance.

This problem can usually be overcome in one of two ways:

Use of a dedicated macro lens. This is a telephoto lens specifically designed to focus at very short distances. They are generally available with focal lengths ranging from 60 to about 180mm. The lens can also be used for standard photography, and its autofocus works throughout its focussing range, right down to the closest distance and smallest subject. This is the more expensive and bulkier, but more versatile option;
Use of an extension tube coupled with a standard telephoto lens. This is quite simply a tube containing no glass, but with all the necessary electrical contacts, that fits between the camera body and a telephoto lens. The effect is to allow the lens to focus much closer to a subject, providing it with an effective close-up facility. This is a small, cheap and highly convenient piece of close-up kit, but it does have limitations. A lens cannot be used for standard photography while it is coupled to an extension tube, and the autofocus usually does not work reliably. Focussing is usually achieved, if using a fixed focal length lens (a prime lens) through a combination of moving the camera (eg on the focussing rail) and by hand turning the focussing ring. If you’re using a zoom lens, the most convenient way to focus is to turn the zoom ring, though this will also change the magnification.

Photography of moving subjects

When photographing moving subjects, such as insects, amphibians and small reptiles, the photographer needs to be mobile, so the tripod and focussing rail necessarily have to be dispensed with. This is almost entirely the realm of hand-held photography.

The same focussing limitations apply, so in this technique we’re still using macro lenses or extension tubes coupled with a normal telephoto lens (zoom or prime). In addition, it is also useful (though not always necessary) to have a flashgun attached to the camera. There are a number of points to bear in mind when using a flash for close-up photography:

The flash is usually fired in such a way that it balances with the ambient light, removing any shadows lying across the subject and providing even illumination. Only occasionally is it used as the dominant light – in poor natural light conditions or at night, of course. On those occasions, although the subject will be well-lit, the background will come out very dark or completely black;
Another reason to use a flash is to help reduce the risk of camera shake, and hence blur to the images. Inevitably, using a telephoto or macro lens and coming in so close to a subject the risk of camera shake being visible in the images is quite significant. Removing that risk ordinarily means using quite a fast shutter speed, but this would then make it difficult to maximise depth of field through use of a narrow lens aperture. The very short duration of a flashgun’s flash (about 1/1000 second) helps to mask any camera shake, thus making it possible to use a significantly slower shutter speed;
Rarely fire the flash directly at the subject, but instead either bounce it off a reflector or fire it through a diffuser. This will help to reduce, or completely overcome, the risk of hard flash-induced shadows around the subject. The only occasion when you might fire the flash directly is when shooting in very bright sunlight and the flash is struggling to generate enough power to balance with that sunlight;
The flash needs to be mounted either some way above the camera or off to one side, or perhaps with a special mount near the end of the lens. Shooting in one of these ways will ensure that the flash does not put a shadow of the lens across the subject – remember that your subject is very close to the lens, and so a lens shadow could easily reach it if the flash is in the wrong position. Do not be tempted to use the pop-up flash found on top of many cameras: this does not give you enough control of the light, it only fires directly at the subject, and because it is so close to the camera body it will fire its light along the lens, generating a long lens shadow that may very well reach the subject;
Because the flash and camera are so close to the subject (less than half a metre usually), a flash firing at full power will almost certainly overwhelm the subjec with too much light. It is important, therefore, that any flashgun you use has a dial-down facility, enabling you to greatly reduce its output.

Apart from these flashgun rules, techniques are similar across both static and mobile close-up photography, and are described below.

General techniques

Close-up photography, whether tripod-mounted or hand-held is best done in soft or even quite flat light. It is tempting to do it in bright sunlight simply to have higher light levels, but then there is the risk of bright highlights and/or shadows being thrown across your subject. With the subject being so small even what appears to be a small shadow or highlight area can have a dramatic negative impact on the final images. That said, if photographing animals and so shooting hand-held with a flashgun attached, sunlight can be very effective, as long as the flashgun has enough power to provide lighting that balances with it.

Naturally, if photographing plants you also need to have windless conditions as any movement will result in blurred images, especially if slow shutter speeds are being used (as is usual, especially in soft lighting conditions).

Remember also that the closer you come to any subject the smaller is the lens’s depth of field (ie the amount of a view that can be sharp). By the time you come down to close-up photography, in which the lens is usually a lot less than a metre from the subject, depth of field is generally only 1 cm at best. To maximise depth of field it is usually necessary to use a very narrow lens aperture – such as f/16 or 22 – something that will further lengthen exposure times and so increase the need for windless conditions.

Of course, it is also possible to improve the situation by increasing the camera’s ISO – the sensitivity of its sensor – thus reducing the amount of light that the sensor needs to be correctly exposed. The problem here is that as ISO increases so image quality declines, so there is a delicate balance to struggle with. There are occasions when the only way to get a useable image is to put the ISO up, but I would always do so only very carefully and to the absolute minimum needed.

I firmly recommend that, as far as possible, you always shoot using the camera’s lowest ISO setting, increasing it only when absolutely necessary.

Finally, a word on composition. Since depth of field is so small, it can be quite a challenge to get the whole of your subject in focus. For some flowers this is not always such a bad thing as having a small part of the flower a little blurred can help to direct attention to one particular part. However, that still leaves the challenge of ensuring that the right part of the flower is sharp!

Things are a little tricker when it comes to photography of insects, such as butterflies. It is quite common to see images in which one end of the insect is sharp and the other end blurred, a result that is rather off-putting and not very satisfying. This problem is the result of the insect being at an angle to the lens: the head is a few millimetres closer to the lens than the rear end of the wings, for example, enough to throw one or the other out of focus.

Ensuring maximum depth of field by using a very narrow lens aperture can help to overcome this, though even this may not be reliable. The most effective solution is to have the insect’s body at exactly right-angles to the axis of the lens, ensuring that all parts of the body are roughly the same distance away. This of course requires that you get yourself and camera in the right position – the insect certainly isn’t going to do it for you – something that can be quite tricky, especially as any movement you make when close to your subject risks frightening it away.

A final word

There is no doubt that close-up photography can be quite a challenge. The difficulties created by short focussing distances, minimal depth of field, awkward lighting, wind, and rapidly moving (and easily spooked) subjects all work to make things very difficult.

However, once you have a few pieces of critical kit together and then make the time to practise, practise, practise the techniques and hence success will slowly come together.

Ge stuck in and enjoy it!

Future talks

The next two talks are on 17th November and 11th December, when I’ll be talking about winter photographer and my in-computer workflow. Click on the link below to register – it’s free!

see past talks

find out about our courses

Wildlife Photography: Insects and Plants

An online talk by Nigel Hicks, given live on 21st April 2021

Wildlife Photography: Insects and Plants is the title for my April 2021 online photography talk. A recording of the talk has now been posted on You Tube, and you can watch it right here. Just click on the image below.

A world of macrophotography

The Wildlife Photography: Insects and Plants talk introduced many of the techniques needed for insect and plant photography, focussing most especially on the areas of overlap. This particularly applies to the area of close-up, or macrophotography, the skills needed for the photography of small subjects.

Obviously, this does not apply to the photography of entire or larger plants, but is important in the photography of flowers, particularly the smaller wild flowers commonly seen in the UK’s woodlands and pastures.

The essential problem – especially when photographing insects – is that the subject is usally so very small. You might be tempted to try to shoot using a telephoto lens, but you quickly find that such a lens has a minimum focussing distance that is just too long. It won’t allow you to come close enough to get an insect or small flower large enough in the final image.

There are two solutions to this problem:

To use a dedicated telephoto lens that is specifcally designed to have a very short minimum focussing distance. This the classic macro lens.
Or you can use an extension tube. This is a very small piece of kit, simply a ring containing no lens, that you insert between the back of a standard telephoto lens and the camera body. This lengthens the focussing distance between the back of the lens and the camera’s sensor, allowing the light rights to be focussed correctly.

The first is an extremely versatile, high quality piece of equipment, while the latter is much cheaper and smaller to carry around, quickly converting an ordinary telephoto lens into one that works at close-up distances.

Welcome to the world of macrophotography, as applied to wildlife photography: insects and plants.

Too close for comfort

So now we can get close to our subject to make it large in our final image. But close enough for us may well be a bit too close for many insects. As you shuffle in with your macro kit it is very easy to frighten off such sensitive animals as butterflies and damselflies, thus completely defeating the object of the exercise. Needless to say, this problem doesn’t apply to flowers, so here we can come in as close as we need to!

So how do we solve the problem of insect shyness? Firstly, there’s the way you approach them, with a couple of does and don’ts:

Never put your shadow across the subject;
Tread very lightly – the slightest vibration through the ground will disturb the insect, especially one that is on the ground;
Absolutely don’t brush against any part of the plant that your subject is resting on;
Don’t rush, just move very slowly. There are times when an insect can seem to accept your presence, but don’t bet on it!

Secondly, there’s the equipment, the right choice of which can help you keep your distance. If using a macro lens, don’t try using one with a focal length of less than 100mm when shooting out in the field. Macro lenses of shorter focal lengths will entail you having to come in just too close for a timid insect to tolerate. Even a 100mm lens is pushing it, and a 150mm lens might be better.

If using an extension tube, you might normally couple it with a 100mm telephoto lens (or equivalent zoom lens). However, if this is making you come in too close then consider coupling it with a longer focal length lens, such as a 200mm or even 300mm lens. Doing this will enable you to stay a reasonable distance from your subject (as much as a metre if using a 300mm lens), helping to soothe its nerves.

If your lens has a hood, think about not using it. Having one of these on the front of your lens greatly shortens the lens-subject distance, thus increasing the problem.

As ever, there is a trade-off. The longer the focal length of your lens and the further you are from the subject, the lower your magnification. If a high magnification is essential to you then you may need to persist with the much closer view.

Keeping it sharp

One of the biggest challenges of macro photography is that of depth of field – the amount of an image that is sharp. As you come in really close to a subject the depth of field becomes really tiny – often less than a centimetre. So focussing is critical. A couple of steps to help this include:

Keep your lens aperture really narrow – no less than f/11, and preferably f/16 or f/22. This will maximise your depth of field (though it will still be tiny!);
Set the lens up so that it is at right-angles to the main surface of your subject (such as a butterfly’s wings), thus maximising your chances of having everything sharp from the head to the tips of the wings.

Photography on the move

Given that any insect subjects will be constantly on the move, you will need to be too. Don’t try using a tripod – just setting one up will be enough to frighten off your subject. So hand-hold your camera.

So this means having to use a shutter speed fast enough to have no camera shake, which of course creates a conflict with the need to keep the lens aperture really narrow. A narrow lens aperture inevitable means a slow shutter speed (for any given ISO setting) as the amount of light reaching the sensor must remain in balance. To have a fast shutter speed you will need to open the lens aperture to allow in more light. This conflict is a difficult one to solve, but here are a couple of methods:

Put up the camera’s ISO. This makes the sensor more sensitive, and so will need less light to be correctly exposed. The problem with this is that as your ISO goes up so image quality deteriorates. However, with the latest generation of cameras this is much less of a problem than it used to be. So if you have a newer model this is a worthwhile approach;
Use a flashgun. Firing a flash will allow you to use a somewhat slower shutter speed than would otherwise be possible. With it firing to balance with the ambient light, it will also put in some fill-in light on your subject, helping to remove any awkward shadows, particularly on a sunny day.

A bit of flash

A bit of fill-in flash is a highly useful tool for insect photography, but I really don’t recommend it for plants – it can all too often put harsh shadows in around the plant, and may cause white flowers to burn out.

It has to be done with a good quality flashgun, however. Because your subject is very close, the gun must be able automatically to quench its power output down to quite low levels in order to avoid blasting the subject with far too much light. You will often need some manual override too, so you can turn it down even more if necessary.

Furthermore, it is usually better not to fire the flash directly at the subject, but to bounce it off a reflector (attached to the top of the flashgun), thus softening the light.

If your camera body has in in-built pop-up flash, resist the temptation to use it for this technique. It is not sufficiently versatile, it can’t be fired indirectly, and because the subject is so close to the end of the lens it may well put a shadow from the lens across the subject.

What about the plants?

Most of what I’ve said so far has concentrated on insects. So what about the plants?

There is plenty of overlap in techniques. For small flowers, macrophotography techniques and equipment apply, though of course not the part of about them possibly running or flying away! Also I do not recommend the use of a flashgun, although occasionally it can be useful.

You may be much more likely to use a tripod with plant photography, thus making sure you can use a narrow lens aperture (ie a high f-number) while keeping low shutter speeds and ISO. It also ensures that you keep exactly to the chosen composition, something that is hard to achieve if shooting hand-held.

Of course, a low shutter speed only works if there is no wind to blow the plant around, and many are the occasions when I have had to wait a long time for a lull in the wind to give me a motionless plant!

A wide-angle alternative

One method that applies only to plant photography is wide-angle photography. Of course, the main method of coming in close relies on macrophotography, which is perfect for showing close-up details of the plant. However, it is useless if you want also to show the plant’s environment.

This is where the wide-angle technique comes in. Bringing a wide-angle lens in as close to a plant as its minimum focussing distance will allow, can result in a reasonably close view of the subject plant, while at the same time showing a good chunk of environment in the background.

You won’t be able to come as close to the plant as a macro technique will allow, and for it to work at all your wide-angle lens must have a quite a short minimum focussing distance, something that not all such lenses have.

When it works it is really very effective.

A final word

Some of these macro techniques are not easy – particularly the photography of insects on the move – and initially success is hard to achieve. But with practice and a lot of failed images success will slowly come. It is worth it because the results can be quite stunning.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this summary of my Wildlife Photography: Insects and Plants talk, and I hope you will/have enjoy/ed watching it.

see videos of previous talks

Find out about future talks

find out about our photography workshops

Focus: the third critical component in successful photography

An online photography talk about the critical role of good focussing in great photography

Focus: the third critical component in successful photography was the subject of my first online photography talk of 2021. I have called it the third critical component because focus forms a holy trinity with composition and lighting. All three must come together for any photograph to have a chance of being successful, dare I say even great. If any one of these three elements is substandard in any photo then that image will be a failure.

Watch this talk here

This talk was recorded, and so you can watch it here now. Just click on the embedded link below. The talk is 40 minutes long, and I really hope you enjoy it.

What does this talk contain?

It may seem blindingly obvious, of course, to say that the main subject of a photo needs to be sharply in focus for that photo to be a success. However, correct focussing goes well beyond just this limited definition.

There are many other issues to consider, such as:

Does the entire image need to be sharp, not just the main subject, as is often the case with landscape photography?
Or would it be better, for example, to have the background blurred, enabling the sharply in-focus subject to ‘pop out’ of the picture, such as is common in portrait or wildlife photography?
Perhaps you need to have just one small part of the photo sharp (containing the main subject) and everything else blurred, ensuring that attention is directed just to this area of the frame;
What about blurred motion as the main subject? Does this need to be sharply in-focus even though it is blurred anyway as a result of movement?

Techniques and technologies

What all the above points cover is the subject of depth of field, and the need to control this in order to control just how much of any photo is sharp.

Depth of field is the amount of an image that is in focus from its nearest point (to the photographer) to its furthest point. This can be varied in a number of ways, primarily:

A wide-angle lens naturally has a bigger depth of field than a telephoto lens;
A narrow lens aperture (ie a high f-number, eg f/16) creates a bigger depth of field than a wide open aperture (ie a low f-number, eg f/5.6).

So, if you use a wide-angle lens shut down to a narrow aperture you will have a big depth of field, potentially ranging from shortly in front of the camera all the way to the horizon. This is commonly used in landscape photography, though also in other photographic genres.

On the other hand, if you use a telephoto lens with a wide-open aperture you will have a very small depth of field, perhaps a metre or less. This is a technique commonly used in portrait and wildlife photography to ensure the face really ‘pops out’ from its background and commands the viewer’s attention.

As the subject-to-camera distance decreases, perhaps once it is less than about 10 metres, then the depth of field starts to decrease for any lens and any lens aperture. Finally, when you get down to macro photography, such as of butterflies, the depth of field even at a very narrow lens aperture is quite tiny, usually no more than about 1 cm or thereabouts.

Further content

During the talk I show a range of images that illustrate the above points about depth of field. The final third of my talk covers some practical examples, in which I have deliberately taken sets of photos at different lens apertures and focussing distances, to illustrate how changing these, along with lens focal-lengths, can have a dramatic impact on the type of image that results.

The final section looks at the problems of macro photography and the tiny depth of field available here. In particular I introduce the technique of focus-stacking: taking a series shots focussed at different points, and then blending them together in the computer post-photography.

Overall, the talk gives a tour of the techniques and skills of good focussing, taking it well beyond the simple process of just getting the subject sharp. Instead, the aim should be to control the depth of field in an image through appropriate use of lens focal length and aperture to produce an image that works for the particular subject and its surroundings.

Find out more about my talks

I hope you enjoy watching this talk. If you’d like to find out more about my talks click on the links below, where you’ll be able to watch recordings of earlier talks, and sign up for some of my upcoming talks.

Each of my talks takes place on a Wednesday evening, once a month, and are free to attend.

I’ll look forward to seeing you online.

find out more about my online talks

see previous online talks

find out about my photography courses