Mad for Macrophotography

There are spiders and other off-putting critters in this story, so please be warned.

It is thrilling to be able to make detailed pictures of little things — big. Modern digital cameras of every stripe, right down to the phone in your pocket, make some form of macro or at least extreme closeup photography not only possible but in most cases easy. It was always fun but often tedious; digital changed that overnight.

One-eighth inch (3mm) ladybird that’s been somewhere very dirty, photographed with a Sigma 70mm F2.8 Art DG Macro, Sony A6300, 100%, cropped. Photo by author. She was fully alive and crawling toward me as I backed the camera carefully away, relying on focus peaking to keep her sharp. Diffused flash. 1/8000-sec.

I was inspired to write and illustrate this since reading Frithjof Moritzen’s terrific piece titled Macro Photography 101. It popped up in my feed yesterday.

The accepted definition of “macro” has long been that the subject must be magnified to 100% life-size or greater at the sensor. Frithjof validates what I have long believed and practiced — just getting in very close is mostly close enough; macro is just making little stuff big. Quite frankly, worst case, you can always crop, and sometimes I do. I know, I know, purists may howl, but I just like to play.

Photo by author. Pure serendipity. I was shooting flowers with a macro zoom when I caught movement at the corner of my eye. I swiveled quickly and shot, but I frightened her, and off she flew, a touch-and-go landing that I was beyond lucky to get. I think the texture on this is terrific owing to the up-and-down full sun.

Since school, I have loved getting in close to little stuff, working with 4x5-inch press cameras as big as your head. They have standard long bellows that allow for increasing magnification well beyond even life-size. By spacing the lens, any lens farther from the film plane, the magnification is increased. There is a downside: bellows extension beyond normal focusing range requires some exposure compensation due to a loss of light in the bellows, plus often another factor called reciprocity failure.* No wonder math classes were a prerequisite just to get into the photography program. Doing macro was challenging and pretty much not hand-holdable.
*A real thing but kinda technical.

Left: Point and shoot in closeup mode; Center: Android phone camera; Right: Normal zoom lens with 16mm extension tube.

Sony 30mm dedicated macro, handheld, external TTL flash also handheld low and left, firing through the wall of the balsam flower. Photo by author.

So much of the tedium has been alleviated by modern automation, including exposure compensation for bellows or extension tubes. Digital seems not to suffer from reciprocity failure, certainly not like film does. Most of the macros and extreme close focus I take nowadays rely on in-camera automation, even sometimes autofocusing. I crow about how modern digital cameras make the previously difficult easy; the impossible still takes a little longer. The ants above, jockeying for position in the nectar well of a balsam flower — well, I don’t know how I’d have gotten it without all the advantages offered by a Miraculous Modern Mirrorless with full-time live view and TTL flash. Back in analog days, by the time I’d finished setting it up and performed all the arcane calculations, these two would have drained the nectar and moved on.

House centipede temporarily trapped by an upturned bowl, macro lens, manual focus with peaking, pair radio-triggered TTL flashes. She’d race around, stop, I’d rock my body enough to see the sparkles of the focus-peaking aid, and off she’d go again. I had to shoot a lot, but autofocus was impractical—author photos.

I am a photovore, photographic omnivore, willing and able to shoot almost anything that crosses my line of sight. I even do some landscapes, but the details and closeups are more interesting than seeing the trees, not the forest. The closer I can get, the better I like it.

Photos by author. The mushroom was shot from below with a 30mm dedicated macro. The camera was pushed into the ground as far as I dared.

I got my first MILC only in 2018. I’d been resisting moving up because I was happy with the results I got from P&Ss, and I liked the portability, but once I got a Sony A6000 — and more — it wasn’t long before I acquired a dedicated flat-field macro lens. True macro lenses have the edge over reversing rings and extension tubes, but for the most part, no one should be pixel-peeping to the extent that they can see a slight loss of critical sharpness.

Each of the below pictures, made by me as long ago as 2007, was made with one or another tiny-sensor point and shoot with a fixed zoom and closeup capability. The originals are all JPEGs, but you can see that they have been reprocessed, even recently in Lightroom (I can’t bear to show anything SOOC). Can you tell that these were not made in raw with ILCs? Does it matter?

The 2014 Christmas watch with the Guadalupe Mountains in the background was me playing around (not exactly the Patek Philippe universe). The same camera made both pictures, a Nikon “Coolpix” P7800, in JPEG because I was still stubbornly resisting raw. Don’t ask. — photos by author.

This tiny jumper is no more than 2mm overall. I only saw her because she moved. I was able to limit her movements to a tray so as not to shoot through glass.

So I’ve inflicted enough on you (are you still awake?), but these last are all thanks to true dedicated macro lenses (I have a couple).

I was astonished and chuffed at this sequence of a golden garden spider patiently engineering her snare. I had just the right angle and light to see her spinneret outputting silk as she worked all eight legs to precisely place the strands, all on instinct. Wow. Photos by author.

On the other hand. this is not by definition macro, although the snake is pretty small—photo by author.

A rare extremely blue morph of a Red-legged Grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum. Identification by Kyle Koch University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Photo by author.

This brown marmorated stink bug (an invasive pest but…) was dead when I found her under a paper towel. I carefully turned it over and used focus-stacking technique to hold all her details sharp. The full sequence of individually focused frames that were combined, “stacked” into a final image at right.

MeiKe 85mm f/2.8 magnifies to 1.5X. — Mounted on a focus rail for high precision. — A rifle rest on a monopod, very good in the field for keeping the camera steady-ish.

Diffused, radio-triggered flashes are good with fast-moving critters. Fully automatic coupled extension tubes work with any lens, including a macro.

Left — Very cheap diopters Frithjof likens to bifocals for your lenses. Center — Sony FE 70–300mm has a macro setting. — Right, 30mm dedicated flat-field macro.

Thanks so much for reading. My late bride often reminded me that I never shut up.