Intro to Macro Photography

At a certain moment in your photography career, you find that you have shot everything you can possibly think of shooting with your camera. You might even run out of ideas or lose interest because you think there is nothing more to take. One of the best solutions is to get a new piece of photo equipment. There are lots of different accessories to choose from that can improve and challenge your skills, but the best place to start is with a new lens. One of the most useful and fun lenses to focus is the macro lens.

All 35mm camera lenses have some kind of ratio that represent the size of an object in the picture compared to its real life size. A typical lens presents objects much smaller than their actual size, while macro lenses will get a ratio much closer to reality. Have you ever seen a close-up picture of a bug’s eye or the tip of a nail? Most likely, those pictures were taken with a macro lens.

There are several different types of macro lenses available. The most common ratio found on consumer-level equipment is roughly 1:2, meaning that subjects in the image on film will be ½ their actual size. This may not seem like much, but remember that you’re going to blow the image up when it’s printed onto an 8x10 or 5x7 photograph, making the final version much larger than real life. Super high grade equipment can go up to a ratio of 5:1 which is powerful enough to look at a snowflake or explore the rough surface of a sponge. Depending upon your budget and the type of results you want, you can get a simple attachment for your normal lens or a full lens that attaches directly to your camera.

Macro Experiments
Once you have a macro lens and have got a bearing on how it works, go out into the world and start seeing things like you’ve never seen them before. Even the most boring of subjects or places can take on new life when viewed from a different perspective -especially with a macro lens.  Here’s some fun things to do with your new macro lens:

• Explore your house and get a bugs-eye view of your furniture, carpet, and surfaces.
• See how the lens expands your creativity by shooting common items in your neighborhood
• Set up a small space and see if you can duplicate “catalog” type images of small products

Macro lenses can have a great impact on how you see the world and provide you with a versatile alternative to shooting with a regular lens. You never know when you might need to make something tiny the center of focus and there’s no better way to do it than by making it huge. It’s also fun to take pictures of common objects at super-close range and see if your friends and family can figure out what the item is. Macro lenses can turn grass into green bladed mountains or ants into scary creatures that make your imagination run wild.

While the cost of a separate macro lens can cost you somewhere between $200-400, you'll find that the extra options you'll have to shoot are well worth the cost. Making mountains out of molehills may not work out for us in our jobs or personal relationships, but in photography it can be great fun. Besides, they always say it’s the little things that matter.