Tutorial: How to make stunning macro shoots with basic equipment?

Level: Basic

Some people often ask me if it is too difficult to make macro shoots with their basic equipment, there is a lot of factors around macro photography including our equipment but all of these things are only a part of a good shoot.

So what do i need to capture macro images of nature with this tutorial?

-Camera (reflex or bridge camera can be used)
-Lens: basic lens or macro lens
-Flash, External or built-in camera flash

If you ever tried to make photos of insects of tiny objects like flowers you maybe noticed that there are three important things that make a photo looks great or looks awful and that is the amount of light and the softness of it, depth of field (f values), and of course the focus.

The light

Making a photo well illuminated can be harder than we think, by this case you only will need your camera built in flash or an external flash, not a macro lens, understanding this concept is the first step to get nice photos.

One of the most important things is get light softened in order to avoid sharp shadows, you can use anything you can as a diffuser, most of the times you can buy a flash diffuser on ebay, amazon or aliexpress, but you can also make one with a simple sheet of white paper in front of your flash or your built in camera flash.

IMPORTANT:

Never use direct flash, always get light softened before taking macro shoots.

A common mistake is using open/lower F values to get more light (f2.8), even if macro lenses have wider diaphragms it doesn't work at all with macro photography and this leads us to the next point, the depth of field.

Depth Of Field and focus

So, whats the deal with DoF and macro?

When you take a photo usually you set lower F values to get more light, this only works when you took photos from a certain distance from the subject, but in macro these things are quite different, if you use open F values you will get an extremely narrow focus zone with almost nothing focused, look at this examples took with F2.8 at less than 5cm from subject:

When i tried to capture this images i get this undesirable lack of depth of field in the picture, this looks good sometimes but most of the times you need additional focus range to get more detail of the subject and this is more notorious when the subject is close to the camera.

You can use this formula to understand how this works in each case:

Low F value (f2.8 to f4.5) + subject close to camera = Low DoF , blurry backgrounds, perfect for portraits

Low F value from (2.8 to f8.0) + subject far from camera = High DoF, perfect for landscapes

High F value (from f8.0 to f22) + subject close to camera =perfect for macro shoots.

Most of the times, if you use a macro lens, you will get low DoF even if you set high F values, the more closer to the camera the less DoF no matter how hight F is, in the following example i used f22 but i get really really close to the subject

The camera values was:
Nikon 40mm Lens
F22
External flash set to 1/2 with a piece of withe paper placed about 5cm in front of it

This other photo was taken just with my camera with the built-in flash, also with a piece of paper placed a few inches in front of it:

I hope this help you to improve your macro photography, if you have any contribution to his post please let me know in the comment box.

Bye