Digital Photography: Macro Lenses

Good photography, whether it's using digital or conventional film, relies on a number of basic things - a camera body, a lens and you! All three of these things can be top quality or just plain average. Which would you prefer?

One of the things I've preached to my photography students over the years, especially the techno-files, is that yes the camera body is important, and never more so than in this day and age of CCD chips and many mega-megapixels, but even more important than the body is the lens or lenses you put on it.

I cannot emphasize enough how crucial good lenses, and unfortunately expensive lenses, are but there is no substitute for good glass and good construction.

And when it comes to Macro/Micro Photography add another 20% to the crucial factor. Do yourself a favor if close-up photography is your thing, buy yourself a brand name, 1:1 Macro lens. Both Canon and Nikon include 1:1 Macros in their stables, they're not cheap, but they're absolutely worth it.

The latest Nikon 105 f2.8 Micro AFS lens is a great example of this quality. It has an incredibly shallow depth of field* when working close up which adds an edge to the creative effect. It can transform the mundane, average reality shot into an emotive art piece in an instant - experience this once, and you'll keep coming back for more, and where needed it produces perfectly sharp, precise images as well.

Macro lenses are expensive but the quality of the lenses speak for themselves and long term the investment is worth it, especially when you consider the huge gain in creativity and enjoyment of using such a precise tool.

Remember one thing though when working really close-up, the shift in focus from in-focus to out-of-focus is so rapid at wide open apertures that it's sometimes hard to be sure the point of focus or the subject you are focusing on is enough to hold the picture together creatively. If in doubt, shift your focal point to several positions on your subject and shoot 3, 4 or even a dozen shots.

One of the fantastic things about this digital revolution is that shooting many frames at a time on one subject has no inherent cost. Experiment! Try different apertures, bracket (taking more than one shot at a time at different exposures in order to get the best exposure), try with flash, try without flash ...

The list of possibilities is endless. It's worth shooting extravagantly in the beginning to find a look and feel that you like. Remember in focus or out focus, with movement and without, they all have merit. If you like crisp clean images, then I advise always using a tripod - the amount of camera shake you get is generally exaggerated the closer you get to the image. Furthermore, because focusing is so critical close up, a tripod is a really useful tool, it also slows you down a bit, allows time for reflection, a bit of time for pondering, weighing up options. Of course this doesn't mean that your subject is necessarily going to stay still, but then you can't have everything.

If you are like me, and you enjoy taking a lot of flower pictures you'll know all about trying to keep flowers steady on a windy day! I've taken pictures in the past where the flower has almost completely left the frame by the time I took the picture. Frustrating and yet even then I've found that sometimes the effect of a flower moving out of frame is gorgeous... a bit blurry, a bit odd but cool nonetheless. Serendipity at its best.

*For those of you who are new to serious macro photography with a DSLR remember that the aperture of the lens is always set to its widest open position to make focusing easier and only shuts down to the aperture you selected when the shot is taken - hence the sometimes annoying difference you see between the final image and the image you see while focusing.

Copyright 2008 Patrick Heathcock