Micro photography tips.
Getting great close-ups is all about noticing the details, so the fewer camera settings you need to think about on the day, the more you can concentrate on getting both the subject and the background perfect.
Things you can pre-set
Just as when you’re shooting portraits, depth of field is one of the most important considerations when it comes to macro shots. Because of this, you should set your camera to aperture-priority exposure mode to give you control over the aperture setting.
An aperture of f/8 is a suitable starting point for macro images, but you may need to alter this to achieve the right amount of depth of field for your shots on the day.
It’s best to switch to manual focusing when shooting close-ups, as focusing is often critical for macro subjects, and using manual, rather than automatic, focus will make it easier to get the precise area of the subject you want to be sharp absolutely in focus (see ‘Use Live View’, above, for more on how to do this).
As many macro subjects will fill the frame with a single colour, the automatic white balance can produce colour casts on your images. Switching to one of the white balance presets will help you avoid this, but you’ll need to set this on the day according to the lighting conditions.
You’ll want the best quality possible for most close-ups, but as both camera shake and subject movement can make it impossible to shoot at very slow shutter speeds, setting the ISO to 200 is a good compromise between image quality and allowing the camera to select as fast a shutter speed as possible.
Settings to change on the day
Choosing the right aperture – one which will keep as much of the subject as possible in focus but blur the background – is the key to many successful macro images.
So even though you can pre-set the aperture to a commonly used setting such as f/8, you’ll often need to change this on the fly according to the subject that you are shooting. When you are taking photographs you should also keep an eye on the shutter speed, as camera shake can be a big problem when you’re shooting close-ups.
If the shutter speed is too slow to allow you to shoot hand-held, you can try resting your camera on a bean bag or other support, but for a really stable platform you should use a tripod.
However, if there’s any wind, you can find that subject movement is as much of a problem as camera shake, and if that’s the case, the only way to enable a faster shutter speed is to increase the ISO setting on your camera – but beware of noise.
If you are shooting hand-held rather than on a tripod, you can change the drive mode to continuous shooting and then shoot in short bursts, as this will increase your chances that at least one image will be sharp.
This is because even very small changes in the distance between the camera and the subject will cause focus errors on many hand-held macro shots; a burst will give you a series of shots at a variety of minutely different distances.
You’ll also need to check the white balance on your camera to get accurate colours. If, for example, the light is falling on your subject through foliage, it will be greener than normal.
This means that the normal pre-set values (or the automatic white balance, though we recommend against that) won’t give the correct colours. In these situations it’s best to use the custom pre-set white balance by shooting an image of a white or grey card in the same lighting as the subject you want to shoot.
