Capturing Details of Nature Photography

When you're thinking about destinations for shooting macro photography, it can be any place. A neighbor's garden, a cabin, a fence. Anything where there's detail, close up detail that begs to be seen up close. That's your place to go for macro photography. We found a lovely location here where we've got these fabulous orange plants. They kinda look like black-eyed Susans, but they're red orange, so I don't know what they are. I'll find out later. But it's a good spot for us to come and get close-up shots. And there's a lot of things that are happening here. One, it's early in the morning and the shade is still prevalent here, which is good for us because oftentimes that early in the morning we're not getting that harsh light that comes from later in the afternoon-type sunlight that you might get. As well as the winds tend to be down. And in macro photography, wind can be an incredible challenge for you. When you're shooting something so close that the slightest little movement bumps it and it goes in and out of focus, it can kill your shot. So early morning is a good time to do this. Right now the winds are just starting to pick up. And so when that happens, I've got a couple of options that I have to consider in shooting macro photography. One, I'm going to have to minimize my depth of field because if I want to stop the action, I've got to have a shutter speed fast enough to make sure that I'm not getting any movement in this shot. And in doing so, I have to open up or I have to ramp up my ISO, so that... The wind isn't that bad right now, so I'm able to shoot this particular flower now. And I'm just kind of getting dewdrops on it, which is kind of nice because I don't have to come in with a spray bottle or a way that's again, early morning, dew, and it's here. I can shoot fairly wide open, you know, F8, F11. Still get a minimum amount of depth of field, but still be able to stop the action. And if there's any decision I have to make that's more critical than others. Making sure that I stop the action because if I want a sharp shot, I've got to be shooting at a shutter speed that's going to stop that action. So that role of aperture choice and ISO are some of the ingredients that you have to make with your shutter speeds in order to stop that action. The other thing is that when you come to a spot like this there's all kinds of options that I can shoot. I don't have to shoot just this flower. I can look for longer ways. I can shoot vertical. I can shoot horizontal. The quality of light is going to change as the sun continues to come up. So there's tons of options that I can do. As well as I can choose lenses. I can have a 105 macro lens, or in this particular case, I've got a 200 macro lens, which really magnifies how close I can get to it. And I get down low. I can isolate just a couple of the dewdrops and just have that be my content. Whereas if I put on my 105, I can pull back just a little bit and I can actually see the whole flower and all of the droplets. So it becomes a choice of composition. It becomes a choice of visual flavor of what you want to get and how you want to approach it. So I've got my 200 millimeter macro lens on here. And what I've found here is on this gorgeous flower, it's got these dew drops all over it. And I'm coming down at an angle that's slightly sideways rather than straight down onto it. And in doing so, I'm able to kind of capture a few of the water droplets and I'm letting a shallow depth of field, which is kind of inherent in macro work. If you want a lot of depth of field it's going to be a long exposure and things like wind are going to kill it. But I'm at an angle now with this 200 millimeter where I'm just focusing on one kind of petal with dewdrops on it. And I'm using a cable release too because I don't want to touch the camera because it's a, it's not a long exposure, it's 25th of a second but that's long enough to if I apply pressure to the camera it's going to be out of focus. And I take my shot and that's with this 200 millimeter lens. And it's got a nice compression effect. I'm able to isolate these subjects. And also, you know, I'm in the shade. Because I'm in the shade, I've also changed my white balance to a shade setting because if I go to daylight in here, it's going to change the color. So the shade setting right now because it's early morning light is really nice. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change my 200 millimeter and I'm going to drop back down to my 105 because I want to come in a little bit closer, and this is going to offer me a little different perspective now. So now I'm just going to inch closer. You know, one of the things you got to be aware of when you're doing this, whenever you're shooting a plant in particular, you know, plants spread out. And even though I've got a tripod here that is fairly wide as I've moved my legs out, every time I move my legs I move another part of the plant which inherently moves the piece of the plant that I want to shoot. So you've got to be really careful with that. That's something that'll just drive you crazy after a while if you keep bumping into stuff and moving it. So I've just changed my composition very little here but I've come in a little bit closer. I'm shooting a little bit more of the plant and I like that. So I've pulled back just a bit even though I've moved closer. It's a smaller compression lens, same rules apply. Even with that magnification, I've got to come in, I've got to make sure that the plant is still. I don't want to move any of the plant. I'm going to come in. In fact, I'm going to lower my angle a little bit here because I just liked that composition. You're going to find with macro, composing your shots is one of those challenges because every time you move just the smallest amount it changes dramatically. But at the same time, with that shallow depth of field as a compositional tool, you can really add interest to your shot by isolating the most important part of the shot, remembering that your eye goes to the brightest and the sharpest spots in every photograph first. If you can incorporate those tools into your shot compositionally, you can really use depth of field here as an advantage to what you want to have your sharp elements be. There it is right there. A nice little dew drop. There's no wind, good time to get it. Let's take a look, look at that. And we're good to go. Very cool. So as you can see by looking at these shots, the big difference between shooting with the 200 millimeter macro and a 105 macro is obviously that compression, that telephoto aspect you get from the 200 versus the 105. Notice how much closer that 200 is versus the 105. And that compression effect that takes place as well. And, you know, we were shooting in the shade this morning. And so there are one of the ways that we can help kind of pump that up a little bit is like any other normal shot you've seen in portraiture. Grab a reflector card. Grab a piece of white paper. Grab an old shirt. Put it up next to your subject to balance the light. You can help fill that up and put highlights on those dew drops, or light the flower a little bit from underneath. Any number of things you can do to brighten up that shot. And use those two focal lengths to bring out the compositional visual elements that please you the most. Both do very different things, similar things, but very different things at the same time. And you can accomplish your goal.