Three macro photos
Over the years I have taken many macro photos, and macro photography has become the kind of photography I do most. I have now and then taken up other forms of photography, but I tend always to return to macro photography. Here I would like to highlight three of them.
The picture of the bee in the grape hyacinths is not my first attempt at macro photography, but it is a quite early one, and looking back it was a turning point for me. It was in many ways here it all started.
Back then I didn't have any equipment made for macro photography, so I did what many others also have done - I used my tele-zoom and I cropped the picture in post-processing. My camera didn't have as many pixels as the cameras of today, but luckily cropping need not be tight - tele lenses can often get decent reproduction rates and often better than other kind of lenses.
Tele lenses also has a natural shallow depth of field that can be both a blessing and a curse. Here it was a blessing, because it isolated the main subject nicely from the background. I am not sure how the background got yellow, though, it should be either green from plants or red from a brick wall.
It also demonstrated the point, that you should try to get in level with what you're trying to photograph. Doing macro photography that often often means lying down, but here it wasn't a problem, because I was standing in a driveway and the flowers was on top of a garden wall.
If you suspect by now, that the picture was pure luck, and I just happened to see a bee and thought, "oh, I try a snap of that, though it will probably won't be any good", then you're probably right.
Another favorite of mine is the Small white butterfly sitting on a window (I have rotated it).
That it is a Small white can be seen from the black marking on the edge of the wings. The markings on the Great white butterfly are bigger. It can also be seen to be a female because of the pairs of black dots on the wings.
I like the way the reflection on the glass adds to the image. A single reflection would probably have been stronger, but it isn't that often that butterflies lands on a reflective surface, so I had to work with what I got. There are two obvious reflections, one from the front and another from the back of the inner glass pane. In the bottom on the picture another pair of reflections can be seen; these are from the outer glass.
I also have version where I am align with the butterfly to get the most out of the shallow plane that is in focus, but it turned out to be quite uninteresting.
The picture of the two snail getting intimate, was actually an experiment in focus stacking. If you want to focus stack, you'll need the motif to be perfectly still. And I mean really, really still. Even on a day without any wind at all, plants will still move just slightly, ruining the picture. So the snails were perfect.
They were sitting on the side of a storage box in a corner of a terrace (yes, the surface was vertical, but I think it looks better tilted like that). And light was rather harsh, with direct sun and deep shadows, so I put a semi-transparent reflector between the snails and the sun.
If you want to focus stack, you will need to take several photos while slightly altering focus in between. You can invest in a macro focusing rail (which incidentally will aid in focusing macros as well, as it is easier to move the camera in a controlled manner than it is to adjust focusing), but they comes with a pricetag and you cannot go cheap because engineering quality matters.
I went another way: I found an app to control my camera remotely that could automate taking a series of photos with slightly different focal length. Due to the way lenses focus a short distances, this is an inferior methods, but hey, it turned out fine. I wont link to the app, though, as it seems to have been abandoned by the developer.
I have tried doing more images with focus stacking, but it is really challenging. Some day I will build a macro "studio" with a light tent and a proper setup, but until then, this will be my best focus stacking picture.
One of the thing I really like about photography is that I can draw attention to interesting point of views. That I can show interesting angles. And macro photography is often about showing that there is an interesting world in the small scale.
But even I can get surprised by my own photos, and I did while post-processing the picture of the two snails, because an little otherwise unseen detail was hiding. If you go back the picture of the two snails, you can find it there too, if you look closely. And it shows that even bugs have bugs!
