Basic Equipment for Shooting Macro Photography

When you hit the road and you're out taking pictures, you try to bring as much equipment as you possibly can for the purpose that you're trying to go out and cover. If I'm out shooting Macro, there's three different basic lenses that you can take with you on your Macro shoots. There's a normal Macro, which is usually a 55 millimeter Macro. And there's a 105 Macro, which is probably the most popular Macro lens that we use. And then we can get into some of the bigger Macros, which is the 200 millimeter Macro. And you can see it's a little bit, twice the size of the 105. Gives me greater magnification. One to one ratio, one to two ratio. And it gives me a great opportunity to go out and photograph things with a number of different compression levels. But when you hear Macro photography, you know, you hear about other things like extension tubes. And extension tubes are definitely an option in shooting Macro. And what those are, is they're just tubes that have no glass in them. And you take your lens off, you put the tube in, and then you take your lens and you put your lens in front of the tube. And it increases your distance, like the old view cameras and the bellows. And, while it can get you closer, it also has some pretty severe disadvantages in that the light is no longer traveling through glass, it's traveling through air. So it's darker. It tends to be more grainy and it's just not the way that most people would go. But if you wanna get super, super closeups of things, you can make your own Macro lenses extension tubes very easily with something as simple, believe it or not, as an old roll of, center of the toilet paper will actually make you a zoom lens. You tape it up, put your lens, tape your lens to it and you've got yourself a Macro lens that's gonna give you greater magnification. Other ways that people will do it, is they'll use filters and they're called diopters. And they can come in any number of magnifications. One power, two power, three power, four power. And all they are is little magnifying glasses. And they go over your lenses and they focus. Again, it has its limitations. It's not the finest optical glass when it comes to the difference between a lens and a filter. But it's another one of those options. And I get comments from folks saying well, geez, I saw this great shot of a closeup of a fly's eyes where I can see thousands and thousands of his little eyeballs inside his big eyeball. Well that's not Macro photography for the most part. You're starting to get into Micro photography. And that's where you're dealing with microscopes and very high end optics for very, very closeup photography. So it's a little different than our standard Macro photography when we go out. So those are your basic lens groups. The 55, the 105 and the 200 millimeter Macro lenses. And so, with these items, when you head out to the field you've got just about everything that you need to be able to go out and shoot Macro work. So there are times in Macro photography where you need light other than good old mister sunshine. And so I will carry a variety of items with me when I'm traveling, to be able to accentuate my light as I need it. This is called Lastolite and it's a great little device that I use that's a portable soft box. And I can take it anywhere and it's got a great clamp on it so I can clamp it on a tree. I can clamp it on a rock, I can stick a stick in the ground and clamp it to that and get some nice light on my subject by just using this light. And basically the Lastolite uses your traditional flash. So this is a unit that's designed to have your flash from your camera that you normally buy, go inside of this nice soft box and give me that option. Other options that you're gonna see with closeup photography there's this other option that is really popular for extreme closeups. And that's what's known as the ring light. And the ring light is kind of a neat way to flash. It's specifically made for Macro photography because it fits right on the end of your lens, like this. And so you have an option here. There's basically two flashes in here. There's one on this side and one on this side, then it goes all the way around. So if you wanna have, think about the sun. The sun comes up, the light's highlighting one side and not lighting the other. That's the same thing you have control on doing with this as well as it giving even light so the entire part of the ring light is lit, giving you very even lighting and distribution everywhere. Some subject matter, you want that. Others, you want a little bit of an accent light, darker on one side, a little brighter on the other. The ring lights are how you do that. It's a great way to do it. Other ways for lighting, we have our typical way of photographing light kind of on the fly with our reflectors. And I tend to carry three of these with me everywhere I travel, especially with Macro photography. You've got the very large size, and then I've got a medium size, and then I've got a really small size. And the small size is really good for Macro because if you're coming in close to flowers you don't want such a big reflector that if you're moving it back and forth, part of the reflector hits the plant that you're shooting and causes it to move, creating that horrible wind. As fake a wind as it would be, it causes problems for you. So the small reflector really is a great way to go. Other ways are to use what's known as the dome light. And I love this thing. It's a great little device. It fits right on top of almost any lens or flash. It goes on to the top of it like this and it sends out powerful light, but a wonderful diffused light. And the great thing about these is that you can not only have it on top of your flash, but if you decide that you wanna shoot it off to the side, then you just use one of the wireless remotes that comes with a lot of the big cameras now. You can buy these separate. And then this sits on top of your camera and then your flash can go off to the side, either way, with this dome light on. And it triggers wirelessly. And you can dial this down so it's one stop too dark, two stops too dark, three stops or vise versa. So you really have a tremendous amount of control wirelessly by just setting this flash off of the ground or on top of a rock and triggering it with this remote unit. It's just another one of those options that you can use where you can basically take a small studio with you anywhere you go outside to help give you top notch Macro shots. Have fun.