Postcard from Tucson – The Macro

Now, we move into the very extreme close-up, where the subjects are bigger than life. Its called a macro. In this photo, I got as close as is possible with a normal lens, although one can get even closer with a special macro lens.

While I don’t have one of these for my digital camera yet, I did own one for my film cameras. In this shot, I moved in as close as I could with my zoom lens, first taking the focus to its closest point, then moving the camera until the flower was in focus. Although I did this without a tripod, one is strongly recommended. Like the close-up in the last blog, the depth of field here is almost next to nothing, so precise focusing is critical.

The real joy of a macro photograph is an enlarged print. When you do this, the flower and the bee become bigger than life, thereby grabbing the attention of the viewer. The is no foreground or background to worry about…the subject is all that counts.

There is an exciting new feature in Photoshop that allows you to first take a series of pictures with your camera, changing the focus ever so slightly each time. The Photoshop will take all the images and combine them into one image so that everything is in focus. I haven’t tried it yet, but will do so one of these days. To take all these images requires a tripod, and absolute control over exposure and color temperature. But the results I have seen are amazing.

I hope you have enjoyed this mini-series on capturing your images from the widest angle to the tiniest flower and bee. We started with a wide field view of Bryce canyon and worked our way down to a honeybee in a flower. The purpose of this exercise was to get your eyes and mind working toward looking at a scene as a whole, then narrowing you vision down and down and down until you find the part of the scene that makes the most artistic sense.

Actually, I could get even tighter with my images, showing you the molecular structure of the bee’s knees, but someone would have to lend me their scanning electron microscope.