Essentials of Macro Photography
Posted by Dmitri | Posted in Photography | Posted on 10-11-2009
Tags: dmitri, gomon, macro, Photography, photos
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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…
So what is macro-photography?
The answer is simple — macro photography is a close-up photography. The word “macro” came from Greek language ( ‘ОјО¬ОєПЃОї’ — 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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[…] of mine, who is very interВested in PhoВtogВraВphy and yesВterВday he already posted his first artiВcle. He will keep postВing more phoВtogВraВphy related artiВcles and I will give more attenВtion […]
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Thats amazing! thank you for this great post!
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[…] This week wasn’t so rich with updates, but still, I didn’t forВget about my blog As you all may have already noticed, now there are 2 authors on this blog, me and a good friend of mine — Dmitri who will write more about phoВtogВraВphy And he already creВated his first post about EssenВtials of Macro PhoВtogВraВphy […]
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