Macro Photography – The Macro Lens

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7 March 2010

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At a certain moment in your photography career, you find that you have shot everything you can possibly think of shooting with your camera. It is entirely possible you may run out of ideas or find yourself in a creative lull. One of the best cures for a situation like this is swinging by your local photo shop and getting a nice piece of gear to experiment with. There are lots of different accessories to choose from that can improve and challenge your skills, but the best place to start is with a new lens. One of the most interesting and useful focused-use lenses out there is the macro lens.

All 35mm camera lenses have some kind of ratio that represent the size of an object in the picture compared to its real life size. A traditional lens presents objects at much smaller than their actual size (imagine a life-sized photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge!) while macro lenses will achieve a ratio much closer to that of reality. Have you ever looked at a close up of a flower or a head of an ant? Most likely, those pictures were taken with a macro lens.

There are several different types of macro lenses available. The most common ratio for consumer photo equipment is about 1:2 which means that subjects in the picture will be half their actual size. This may not seem like much, but remember that you’re going to blow the image up when it’s printed and framed to an 8×10 or 5×7, the final version will be much larger than real life. Super high grade equipment can go up to a ratio of 5:1 which is powerful enough to look at a snowflake or explore the rough surface of a sponge. You can find simple attachments for your normal lens (these have varied results) or a full lens to attach to your camera body, whatever suits your budget.

Macro Lens Experiments
Once you have a macro lens and have got a bearing on how it works, go out into the world and start seeing things like you’ve never seen them before. Even the most familiar of subjects or environments can become dramatically new and exciting when viewed from a different perspective, and a macro lens will certainly provide that to you. Here’s some fun things to do with your new macro lens:

Explore your house and get a bugs-eye view of your furniture, carpet, and surfaces.
See how the lens expands your creativity by shooting common items in your neighborhood or house
Set up a small space and see if you can duplicate “catalog” type images of small products like shooting an image of an ornate picture frame.

Macro lenses can have a great impact on how you see the world and provide you with a versatile alternative to shooting with a regular lens. You never know when you might need to make something tiny the center of focus and there’s no better way to do it than by making it huge. It’s also fun to take close up photos of normal objects and see if your friends and family can identify them. Macro lenses can turn grass into green bladed mountains or ants into scary creatures that make your imagination run wild.

While the cost of a separate macro lens can cost you somewhere between $200-400, you’ll find that the extra options you’ll have to shoot are well worth the cost. Making mountains out of molehills may not work out for us in our jobs or personal relationships, but in photography it can be great fun. Besides, they always say it’s the little things that matter.