Macro

What is Macro Photography? Macro photography takes an extremely small subject, or part of a subject, and zooms in on that smallness, making it large. You've likely seen some of these photos of insect eyes that are huge, but typically you can't actually see all that detail in the insect's eyes with the human eye.

This week, I want you to get as close as you can and zoom in to take a small subject and make it larger! And, I want you to ensure your photo is well composed and focused.

With a cell phone, this is extremely challenging because we have little control over the settings of the camera. In addition, low light can add a lot of noise to the picture (overly pixelated areas - some cellphones have a denoise option but a little goes a long way... You lose focus with the denoise option).

How do we combat this as much as possible?

• Make sure your area is well-lit. Outdoors is best, but avoid midday where the light is super harsh and you'll end up with strong highlights and shadows.

• Get as close to your subject as you can, then take two steps back.

• Zoom in with your camera, but be careful. You do not want to zoom all the way in because you'll lose some focus.

• Make sure you click on your phone screen where you want to focus and stay as still as possible (your phone is likely going to be using a slower shutter speed and our natural shakiness can cause blur). Do not be surprised or disappointed if there is a lot of blur not too far from your focal point. With a small depth of field, it's not possible to keep the entire image in focus with a cell phone when doing macro photography.

• It's likely not going to be the perfect image straight out of the gate - edit! Use the editing information I've provided in the previous blogs and feel free to reach out for help if you can't get it just right!

It won't always come out perfect or be an image you care to keep. I'm posting my purple fake lavender image fail so you can see it's not always great!

What went wrong? There was not enough light in this area (you can see the shadow from my flash which I tried to use to add light), I was too close to the object and zoomed in too much, and I didn't click my phone screen to focus the image.