rl Creative

My name is Dmitri Gomon, I am a friend of Roland and also a new author of RL Creative blog. My main hobby and passion is photography, more precisely nature and macro photography. Today I decided to write about latter, since I have been working mostly in style of macro-photography.

People keep asking me – “Why are you so fascinated with macro photography? And how it all has begun?” Well, my first introduction into macro-world happened when bought a macro lens for my Canon A80 camera. With that relatively cheap accessory it changed my world entirely.

First of all, I tried to capture some indoor objects – flowers, pencils water droplets. Until, I found a sleepy fly in my room and that fly became my first macro shot of an insect.

From this moment, summer months for me became “happy hours”, since in Estonia (where I am from) only during summer months most of the insects are coming to life.

In the following articles I will describe in more details how I am taking macro photos, for now lets move on…

The answer is simple - macro photography is a close-up photography. The word “macro” came from Greek language ( 'μάκρο' - big or far) and means that a photographer will be taking shots of objects that will appear big on a final picture.

Term “macro” in photography represents the ability of cameras to focus close enough on objects so that on a final photo objects are seen magnified. Different cameras and lenses have various magnifying ratios – ranging from 1:2 (magnification 0,5x) up to 5:1 (magnification 5x) of real size. Those numbers might be confusing, so to put it simply – with 0,5x magnification you can take a picture of a butterfly sitting on a flower; with 5x magnification you are able to look inside the eye of that same butterfly.

How is macro shot taken, and how does it differ from usual snapshot?

I will bring you one simple example. If you are looking at something from a distance, let’s say an apple on a plate – it is a usual viewpoint where you will see just an apple and a plate. However, if would move closer to the apple, you will see more details of that apple – peel’s structure, its color and shape…

Exactly the same thing is needed for macro shot – you have to move your camera as close as possible to the subject to capture it.

Main subjects of macro-photography?

To answer this question each person has to ask himself/herself. Since almost everything, could be captured from close range, making it a macro photo. In my opinion, the main beauty of macro is to take close-up shots of regular every-day things – magnified view of a tree’s leaf, piece of a glass, candy, fruits, insects, animals… this list is endless, and it is limited only by our imagination.

Considering above-mentioned subjects of macro photography, we can conventionally divide photos of different subjects into numerous categories. For instance, shots of water-droplets, flowers, snowflakes… the mostly represented category in macro photography nowadays are photos of insects. Please take a look at photos by various macro-photographers at the end of my article.

If that topic sounds interesting to you, please come back soon, since in my next article I will be writing about techniques I am using for taking my macro-photos.

So bye-bye, and see you soon!

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