How to take really bad macro photos?

Make mistakes – it’s the only way to improve

This essay is really a memo to myself to remind me of the things I have learnt on my journey to try and yet fail so often, to take good macro photos. My opinion of my macro photos is that I sometimes take photos that rival those of other macro photographers that I admire but that more-often-than-not, my hit rate is low and all-too-often I am rather disappointed with the outcome. However, there are two reasons why I haven’t thrown up my hands and given up. The first is that without a shadow of a doubt, macro photography is technically very demanding. Indeed, perhaps the most technically demanding of all genres. Thus, everyone can expect a lot of failures. Secondly, I just love it – finding interesting creatures and then capturing pictures of them that underline the truth of my personal catch-phrase, “The closer you look, the more you see”. My opinion is that that catch-phrase applies to more or less all genres of photography but in the case of macro, it is about capturing details that would otherwise require a hand lens and/or a preserved specimen. Below is my attempt to summarize what I have learnt so far about macro photography. Point 1 is above; it isn’t easy!

Kit

Lenses? You can take a good macro photo with a phone: maybe. You can definitely take very good macro photos with any half-decent camera, extension tubes, reverse-mounted lenses or screw-on/clip-on accessory lenses. However, you can’t really beat a dedicated macro lens and many of these can as a bonus, also serve as a good portrait or more general purpose, lens. Over time, I have had quite a few macro lenses from various manufacturers (Nikon, Loawa, Canon, and Olympus (OM)). A while ago, I decided the weight of my old Nikon D7000 and Micro Nikor 105mm VRII was just too much and I switched to Micro 4/3rds. Now I have both the Olympus 60mm and 90mm Pro macro lenses as well as the Loawa 1-5X 25mm Ultra Macro. I don’t intend to go into the pro’s and con’s of different macro lenses but if I was going to buy just one for Micro 4/3rds, it would be the Olympus 60mm Macro. It’s cheap, goes to 1:1 and is weather sealed. The main point is that if you are really into macro, a dedicated macro lens is definitely the way to go.

Cameras? I don’t think they are as important as some people seem to think. Equipped with a macro lens, any interchangeable lens camera can take good macro photos. If I was looking for a feature that can take macro to greater heights it would be to choose a camera that can focus bracket but that isn’t essential. I get as much or more fun, out of single shots as I do out of focus stacks. Stabilization is good to have but not essential. I don’t think I would want to do without the ability to take multiple shots in a short period. Being able to hold a camera steady (more of which later) is really important but even if you have great stance and a steady hand, its nice to be able to hit the shutter button and fire off a group of shots within which the photographers slight movements, intentional or not, will hopefully, automatically ensure at least one is in focus. Focus peaking is a boon. I have it set so I can engage it from a button on the camera body – when I press it, focus peaking is constantly engaged not just when you turn the focus ring.

I have an OM-1 Mk 2 and EM-1 Mk2. Both are great cameras with capabilities far, far, beyond my own. However, every major make and format will enable their owners to take great macro photos.

You don’t need a flash gun to take great macro shots – you can just use natural light. However, you will find a good flash along with a good diffuser, in every serious macro-photographers kit bag. I have had many flash guns. However, with the advent of in-camera focus bracketing or when using the ‘spray-and-pray approach’, something that has the ability to recycle quickly means that I now only use one of my flashes – the Godox V350o. More about the lessons I have learnt about using a flash and diffuser can be found below.

Holding the camera

Yep, I learned a lot about holding the camera and I am still learning. You’d think it was simple – grab the camera on both sides, focus and press the button! Absolutely not! Though aficionados like Robin Wong can take great photos with the camera in one hand and a flash in the other, I can’t do that and most macro photographers take the camera in both hands and adopt various forms of ‘steadying stance’. The first trick is two keep your elbows pressed into your sides – most people know about that one, and it really helps. Better still, get level with your subject by kneeling or lying and then steady the camera by pressing your elbows into your thighs or knees or if lying down, push your elbows against the ground or steady your camera with a bean-bag. Another steadying trick: if you have a walking pole, hold the camera with your left hand wrapped around the pole and your right hand directly holding the camera – you can slide your hand up and down the pole to get the view you want and it also a very useful aid in helping ‘creaky’ people like me to get up again! A stance I have only recently discovered involves placing your left hand on your shoulder and resting the camera on the crook of your elbow. Any of the above beat leaning forwards with your elbows out – if you can get a good shot that way, it’s a miracle.

The problem with all of the camera-holding techniques described above is that for seriously close work, none are as good as holding both your camera and the object you want to shoot. You can hold the stem of a flower or branch with your subject on it, rest your lens or diffuser on that hand, and hold your camera with the other. Sounds awkward but it is the preferred technique of many macro photographers, particularly when trying to focus stack. Of course, it helps if you first set up your focus, aperture, exposure, ISO etc.

What about a tripod or monopod? I have little to say that’s good about them; useful for shots of plants, insects that have been captured and cooled to keep them still, or dead specimens. Otherwise, useless…by the time you are set up, whatever it was you wanted to shoot will most likely be gone. For plants, it can be useful to have something that will hold a stem (Wimberly Plamp) to counteract any movements caused by the wind – so yes for botanical and studio shots a tripod or monopod could be pretty useful. The key thing is to choose a tripod that lets you get down low – there are many available and I won’t discuss them further.

Getting things in focus

Focus is probably the greatest problem in macro. That’s why camera holding is so important. If you are working very close, though the depth of field will of course depend on aperture, you can guarantee it will only be a very thin slice of the world that is in focus. A quick calculation shows that for my 60mm macro lens at f5.6 and closest focus (23cms to the sensor), the DoF is less than a millimeter. Though you may get lucky, holding your camera still within a millimeter of the desired plane of focus is almost impossible. The solution? Either focus bracket or use your own movement and multiple shots, to capture a picture that really is in focus. At greater distances and lower magnifications you are more likely to be able to capture things in focus with a single shot. Longer lenses do not help – focal length does not actually influence DoF if you adjust the camera-subject distance so that the magnification of your subject is the same.

So, why not just stop the lens down to get greater DoF? Yes, you can do that but there is a ‘cross-over point’ at which diffraction softens the image. That said, perfectly acceptable pictures can be had at smaller apertures than would normal be considered optimal.

The next ‘so why not’ is ‘why not use CAF (continuous auto-focus)’? Actually, I have found that for lower magnification shots the CAF on my OM-1 Mk2 is fast enough to be useful. However, close up it really isn’t much use, you are better off working in entirely manual focus. A compromise that I use is ‘back-button focus’, a technique that divorces automatic focus from pressing the button to fire the shutter. Thus, I can press a button on the back of the camera to set the initial focus, I can then tweak that by either moving the camera backwards or forwards and/or using the focusing ring. Though it takes some getting used to, I have found there really are big benefits to be had from back-button focus and it gives me the choice of manual or automatic focus and the ability to use both seamlessly. The huge advantage of back button focus is that it allows you to set the focus once, and that focus will then stay set until you change it again manually. This can be particularly useful in situations where you need to make sure you’re focusing on the same subject time-after-time, where the automatic focusing system will jump to focus on something else or hunt .

Having the focus set perfectly is far from ensuring you will have a sharp picture! There is of course ‘the fumble factor’. The fumble factor is the result of your own movements. As described above, they can be helpful when it comes to getting a shot in the appropriate plane of focus. However, that isn’t the only plane in which ‘fumble’ occurs! Depending on how much coffee you have drunk, your age, your level of excitement (?) etc., and despite adopting best practice in camera holding, you will wobble. Modern cameras’ image stabilization systems (IS) can within reason work wonders though it probably helps if you are also ‘steady’ plus with very small objects, your wobble may affect composition – you may lose a bit of something you wanted in the frame. I very soon discovered the scale of my ‘fumble factor’ and the limits of my cameras’ IS systems albeit those of OM System cameras I have are outstandingly good.

If you are photographing insects, they don’t ‘fumble’, but they do of course, move. Plus, there is the wind to consider. Though at lower magnifications, CAF can help, up really close it doesn’t…spray-and-pray is probably the way to go. However, even that will not help unless the exposure time is very short. Personally, in natural light, I seldom use less than 1/250^th and preferably much faster. In setting the exposure time there is of course a trade off with aperture and ISO and aperture also trades off against composition (what is in focus and where). Even in bright sunlight, I often find that in order to get a good combination of aperture and speed, I need to use non-native ISO say 400 up to 3200. Fortunately, though native ISO (100 or 200) is best for low noise, modern sensors are pretty good at these higher ISOs.

Thank the Lord for the flash gun! It transforms macro-photography. You can enjoy seriously brief exposures, have the aperture set to something that will give you some DoF or if you buy a fast recylcing flash, take a stack of pictures to give you the depth of field you want.

Flash in macro-photography is a battle between light and dark

Unless you are taking flash photographs at night, or in a coal-cellar, every press of the shutter button will bring you two exposures: one image formed by natural light and another by the brief burst of light from the flash gun. If your subject is sufficiently illuminated by natural light, and because the maximum sync speed of modern cameras is usually less then 1/250^th of a second, your ‘fumble’, the subject’s movement, or both, will likely have formed a blurry image on which there will be superimposed an image from the flash – nasty! The way round this is to overpower the daylight falling on your subject with the light from the flash gun. You can reduce the natural light by orienting the flash diffuser or your own body such that it shades the subject or you can seek subject that are in shady places. If the subject is really close, you will only need a tiny fraction of the flash’s maximum power – perhaps 1/16, 1/32 or less. You can reduce the ISO to native (200 on my cameras), use the maximum sync speed (1/50^th, 1/100^th and 1/250^th on my cameras depending on whether you use the mechanical or electronic shutter) and close up the aperture, to reduce the natural light image. I think the skill here is setting things so you get the background you want. If you want the subject against a black background you can take the options described above to achieve that or you can balance the power of the flash close to the lens against the natural light to get a more natural backdrop to the subject. An ND filter can sometimes help if you want dramatic and totally black backgrounds – you can turn the flash power up to compensate for the filter while the natural light of course remains constant. At low flash powers, your effective exposure time is really short (for 1/32^nd flash power about 1/10,000^th of a second). The brevity of the flash ensures that as long as the subject is in focus, the image will be truly sharp. The low flash power also means that the flash will be ready to fire again very quickly – the Godox 350o has no trouble keeping up with dozens of exposures at 1/100^th of a second. Hence, focus bracketing works well at these low flash powers. You will notice that I haven’t mentioned the in-camera focus stacking capabilities of my OM cameras – that’s because I don’t use them much – it takes several seconds for the camera to do all the computations to produce the composite image. I would rather take the time at home, have the camera ready again quickly, and have Helicon Focus do the work.

A naked flash is pretty much useless for macro-photography. Without a diffuser, most of the light is thrown too far forward from the front of the lens and the light the flash produces will cause very harsh shadows and specular highlights. The best diffuser is one that creates what is in effect an ‘extended light source’ – the light from the flash head is distributed over a much larger area of diffusion material and it is the light from that material that illuminates the subject. The diffuser that I use is reviewed here:https://petermobbs.com/techno-2/ .

All those other settings

Fortunately, most of it is covered above. The only thing to reinforce is the need to get the exposure right and not to rely on ‘saving’ the photo in post. Yes, RAW files allow you to do a lot to rescue a picture but there is no substitute for getting the exposure right in the first place. The only other thing I can think of that I find important is to make use of custom modes and the ability to designate buttons to various functions. Thus, I can designate a button to activate focus bracketing, another to turn on and keep focus-peaking on, and one for autofocus. I use custom modes to store my settings for natural light macro, another for flash and bracketing, another for landscapes etc.

Composition

I consider this to be my greatest failing. When I am processing my photos I have to crop them way too often and way too much. I need to constantly tell myself to fill the frame with what I want and not to rely on cropping. That said, I’ll take a bet that a very large fraction of what are otherwise great macro photos, have been cropped – it’s hard to avoid, but one should try harder! Other reminders to self are to think about the lighting, the plane of focus – it is almost always best to have the subject’s eye in focus. Are there objects sticking into the field of view from the edge of the frame? Do I want the eye in the dead centre of the frame or do I use the ‘rule of 1/3rds’? Can I introduce some symmetry? Should I focus stack to get much more DoF? The list goes on which is why it isn’t easy but the reward is, ‘the closer you look, the more you see’. Keep looking closer and know as I have discovered, nearly all my failed shots had nothing to do with my camera – it’s mostly me that needs improving!

The hunter and the hunted

You will find many YouTube videos that help with macro-photography. Many are a fantastic aid to taking great macro photos. That said, where insects are concerned, there are two kinds of macro-photographer on YouTube; those who are solely interested in getting great macro photos and those who yes, want great photos but who are also interested in what it is they are photographing. Knowing something about the creatures you are trying to photograph will certainly help in finding them, knowing when is good time to hunt for them and how to approach them. With a camera in your hand you are as much a hunter as if you had a gun (I disapprove of hunting with a gun!). Many insects are skittish. When photographing them, it helps if its cool – they move slower. It helps if you approach them slowly, carefully and silently – take shots as you go because at some point in your approach, it’s very likely that they will take flight. Wear clothes that aren’t too bright and try not to get between your subject and the Sun. While it’s great to go out and shoot whatever you see, often it’s nice to get out with a specific quarry in mind – say, damselflies. In that case, its good to adopt the approach taken by a lot of landscape photographers. Landscape photographers get to know where it is they are going to photograph and when its best to be there to get that perfect shot. The same is true if you want to photograph some insects. Read about your prey – investigate the habitats they may inhabit – do your ‘scouting’ and then go out and take photos. Your chances of getting the photo you want will be greatly enhanced and I have learnt a lot about some species by taking that approach. Finally, insects and other ‘macro-quarry’ are creatures of habit. If they are on a particular bush on a particular day, there is a very good chance that they will be there again the next day and at the same time as before. This is true even down to the branch on which they perch. Sometimes the best approach is just to sit and wait.

Most important thing of all?

Enjoy what you do! Blurred shots? You’ll get thousands. It doesn’t matter…you’ll get one you are proud of and it will make up for all the failures….it isn’t easy!