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Introduction to Macro Photography

At a certain moment in your photography career, you find that you have shot everything you can possibly think of shooting with your camera. You might even run out of ideas or lose interest because you think there is nothing more to take. One of the best cures for a situation like this is swinging by your local photo shop and getting a nice piece of gear to experiment with. There are lots of different accessories to choose from that can improve and challenge your skills, but the best place to start is with a new lens. One of the most interesting and useful focused-use lenses out there is the macro lens.

All 35mm camera lenses have some kind of ratio that represent the size of an object in the picture compared to its real life size. A traditional lens presents objects at much smaller than their actual size (imagine a life-sized photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge!) while macro lenses will achieve a ratio much closer to that of reality. Have you ever seen a close-up picture of a bugs eye or the tip of a nail? Most likely, those pictures were taken with a macro lens.

There are a few varieties of macro lens available. The most common ratio for consumer photo equipment is about 1:2 which means that subjects in the picture will be half their actual size. This may not seem like much, but when you enlarge the image and frame it to a 5x7 or 8x10, the final object is much bigger than in real life. Super high grade equipment can go up to a ratio of 5:1 which is powerful enough to look at a snowflake or explore the rough surface of a sponge. You can find simple attachments for your normal lens (these have varied results) or a full lens to attach to your camera body, whatever suits your budget.

Macro Experiments
Once you have a macro lens and have got a bearing on how it works, go out into the world and start seeing things like youve never seen them before. Even the most boring of subjects or places can take on new life when viewed from a different perspective -especially with a macro lens. Heres some fun things to do with your new macro lens:

• Explore your house and get a bugs-eye view of your furniture, carpet, and surfaces.
• See how the lens expands your creativity by shooting common items in your neighborhood or house
• Set up a small space and see if you can duplicate catalog type images of small products like shooting an image of an ornate picture frame.

Macro lenses can have a great impact on how you see the world and provide you with a versatile alternative to shooting with a regular lens. You never know when you might need to make something tiny the center of focus and theres no better way to do it than by making it huge. It's also fun to take close up photos of normal objects and see if your friends and family can identify them. Macro lenses can turn grass into green bladed mountains or ants into scary creatures that make your imagination run wild.

While the cost of a dedicated (separate lens) macro can run you $200-400, youll find that the options it gives you and the inspiration it can provide are well worth the cost. Making mountains out of molehills may not work out for us in our jobs or personal relationships, but in photography it can be great fun. Besides, they always say its the little things that matter.

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