Macro photography is up close and magnified. Macro photographers have specialised equipment to capture the types of photographs and video clips seen in nature documentaries.
Enthusiasts can get started with much less. There are now even macro lenses that attach to smartphones letting you use the camera of your phone. Attach a magnifying lens over the camera lens, turn on the torch light, zoom the camera in on the subject and then snap the picture.
Just the minimum of setups with some basic gear is enough to change everything you photograph.
In macro photography, the goal is to capture the wonders that escape our vision. The art you can find only by magnifying can be anything from up close flowers in bloom, insects pollinating flowers, tiny critters using their antennae to decimate plants, or ants getting into fisty cuffs with ladybugs to protect a colony of aphids that’s feeding on plants.
The wonders in nature are full of surprises. Much is happening beneath the leaves, in the flowers, and up high in the canopy of trees.
The benefits of macro photography
Photographers can find multiple advantages to shooting the objects that escape our vision. The magnification brings the subjects to life, and it is highly educational.
In a photo display, such as a photo wall at a nature’s reserve or wildlife park, macro photos are often framed and displayed to educate visitors about the wildlife around the park.
Rather than only showing photos of the plants, accompanying those photos can be pictures of the critters that can only survive by eating the plants.
One subject, one visual display, multiple related fields
That is what macro photography can do. Capture the close-ups of plants, insects, flowers blooming, nectar, birds and even bacterial and fungal growth.
The types of shots that would rarely be frame-worthy under normal conditions suddenly become masterpieces under the microscope.
The webbed pattern of fungi and bacterial growth in a reptile enclosure, springtails feeding on the spores, and when it happens in aquariums, the fish going at the springtails.
Much of the things people take for granted is brought to the forefront in macro photography.
Getting macro photos to a printable quality
The lenses are what make macro photography good. Magnification alone just makes things blurry. That’s why if you take your phone and zoom right in on a subject, the details will be blurred.
To get the most detail without the blurriness, a magnifying lens needs to be placed over the camera lens, then the zoom function used. Some equipment is better at auto focusing and reducing movement.
When taking the photographs at high zoom though, blurring is likely. In particular, if you are taking a photo outdoors of anything that moves. The movement will show in the photo as a blur. Shutter speeds can be tweaked to reduce the amount of blurring when taking photos of a moving object.
If you find yourself bored with ordinary landscapes on your walls, change your art to something magnified. Some of the most amazing art prints are captured by macro photographers. At the macro level, everything in nature is magnified and it can make spectacular art.