Macro Photography for Beginners

Maybe the title should be "Introduction to Macro Photography" but that sounds too grand. The trigger for creating this page was a session held on macro photography at a weekend away for some photo club members in NSW, Australia. There seemed to be great deal of interest in the subject even though it can get quite involved at times. Here is my attempt to help spread some more light on the subject. It will be information that will help beginners understand what you can and can`t do with 35mm SLR macro photography and some of the methods that can be used to achieve results. People who aren`t beginners may also find some useful information.

There is no really easy way into macro photography, all the normal rules of everyday shots seem to fall down and life gets more complicated and expensive if you want to do it correctly. The invention of automatic cameras and TTL flash photography has made life easier when dealing with macro photography. Now of course with just about any compact digital camera life is quite easy. In general these notes will be about SLR film cameras which of course also now means digital SLR cameras. More about digital at the end of the article.

Mirror lockup is a topic often discussed in relation to macro work. The mirror slapping up in a film or digital SLR before the exposure causes vibration in the camera and may cause sharpness problems due to camera shake in the shutter speed range of about 1/30 to 1/8 second. Either choose much faster or much slower shutter speeds than that troublesome range or use flash as the main light source where the 1/1000 sec or faster flash burst stops any camera shake effect.
Older SLR cameras tend to have very noisy mirrors generating lots of shake, modern cameras have a better designed mechanism and shake is not so much a problem now.

This page is aimed at people who have SLRs with through the lens metering of both incident light and flash. Older cameras require more calculations and effort to get decent results. If you are attacking macro with older equipment (or even new equipment) it is important to keep notes on what you do so that future setups are easier and mistakes are minimised.



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The term "macro" is used very loosely and tends to mean any photographic situation where you get close to the subject.
Real macro photography is where you are working around 1:1 ratio and closer thereby giving an image on film that is equal in size or larger than the subject being photographed. The range from life size on film (1:1) up to ten times enlargement on film (10:1) is be the strict definition of macro photography. The range from 1:10 (1/10 life size on film) to 1:1 on film should properly be called "close-up" photography.

Most lenses don`t get very close at all so that close-up you tried of that nice flower or interesting bug often turns out disappointing.
Zoom lenses usually have a "macro" setting where they may get close enough to give maybe 1:4 ratio (image on film is 1/4 the size of the subject). Any normal 4"x6" print made from that negative will yield a picture of the subject about life size due to the approximately 4x enlargement needed to make the print. But if it was a small flower/bug it still will be a small flower/bug on the print.

Life gets more interesting when you get closer to the subject and get closer to the 1:1 image size. Enlargements made now will start to be spectacular as the image on the print can be much larger than life size.

Understand that in all macro photography as the lens gets closer to the subject and the image gets larger on the film, the light reaching the film is lessened. Also the depth of field gets very shallow and to combat this, very small apertures are called for which lessens the light to the film even more. Both these things in combination mean that normal hand held exposures are usually out of the question. A tripod is needed for steadiness plus flash is needed in nearly every circumstance to give decent illumination.

Often the image size on the film is the important feature so the focus is done manually to get the size of the image correct then final focus on the subject is done by moving the whole camera to and fro. To make life easy a mechanical attachment is added to the tripod head to allow smooth movement of the camera making the final focus easier.

What you need to get things happening is a camera that can be used in aperture priority mode and manual mode and preferably having TTL control of the flash. A good sturdy tripod is essential as camera shake is magnified greatly when working in macro. To avoid shaking the tripod you need a remote release, this may be a mechanical or electronic release, or you can employ the self timer and use the 10 second delay until it fires to let the arrangement stop shaking after touching it. A TTL controlled flash, two are better, can be of another manufacturer as long as all the TTL extension cables fit and work correctly. And the focussing rail mentioned in the above paragraph makes focussing easier, this can be store bought or made by an enthusiastic handyman. The rest of the macro equipment needs to be chosen after reading the descriptive text.

There are many ways to attack macro photography and some are much more expensive than others. I`ll try and list them starting from the cheapest method. The main text areas linked to will explain better the good and bad points of each method.