A Perfect Rose
NEX-6, 30mm Macro E-Mount Lens @ 30mm, Aperture Priority Mode, 1/60 secs, ISO 400, f/3.5
Each week, once I have put my post up here, I share a few of the photos on the Sony UK Facebook page, and earlier this week I received a request on there for tips about taking close up shots. So, I thought this weekend would be a good time to post ones I had taken of some roses a couple of months ago, along with a more thorough explanation of how I approached them. I chose the featured photo because I feel the composition fits in neatly with the title – it fits the golden ratio spiral almost perfectly.
A similar shot to the featured image, but with the rose being centred in the composition.
When composing your shots, it often helps to follow The Rule of Thirds, which means that your subjects should ordinarily not be centred in the frame of the shot – they should be positioned around a third of the way along, and up/down, the image. This is fairly easy to achieve with the Sony NEX-6, as the electronic viewfinder can have such a grid overlaid for composing your shots as you take them. Even without this though, it is not too difficult to imagine and can always be fine tuned with a little cropping in computer software, such as Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom.
My first shot of the roses contained some blown out background, which I like as it makes the image look as though it has had the white background added in Photoshop.
The roses that I was photographing were the ones that my Mum had at her house from my Grandma’s funeral, as she asked me to come and take a few shots of them for her. The equipment that I used was my NEX-6, macro lens, tripod and reflector, and I think I used my Dad as a reflector stand from time to time. The fact that I used a camera is pretty obvious, but the other items could probably do with a little explanation for anybody who is looking to indulge in a little close up photography for the first time, and hasn’t read any other more helpful guides already!
The same shot as above, but with a cyanotype filter applied in Aperture 3. This gives the image a faux-infrared feel, which I think compliments the blown out background.
Whilst a macro lens isn’t essential for close up photography, you will find that it allows you to get much closer to your subject than an ordinary lens will, as ordinary lenses will not focus on objects that are very close to them. My macro lens does not magnify anything and cannot be zoomed, but it does allow me to focus on objects that are literally a few millimetres away from the front lens element, which means that if you wish to get really close to your subjects, and capture every possible detail, a macro lens is going to give you the very best opportunity to do so. However, using a macro lens does come with its own set of unique obstacles; the biggest of which is the fact the closer you are to a subject, the narrower the depth of field becomes. You can see this in my featured image, for which I naively used the widest open aperture of the lens – f/3.5. The sharpest area of the shot is the top of the petals in the centre of the flower, but if you look to the left, you can see that the detail on the petal a few millimetres further from the lens is already starting to become blurred. With macro photography, your depth of field really can come down to millimetres, which means that you will often have difficulty in creating an image that is truly sharp across the whole range.
This shot was taken from further away, with an aperture of f/8, but the background is still more blurred than you might expect from that setting. Again, this is due to the lens being much closer to the subject than it might ordinarily be for other types of photography.
As a result of every millimetre being important, it really is a good idea to use a tripod when attempting macro shots. This allows you to set the camera’s position, manually focus on the exact spot that you want to, and then release the shutter to take the shot. If attempting to do this hand-held, you will more than likely move the camera a millimetre here or there, which can ruin your shot before you even take it. The simple act of depressing the shutter release can cause you to move your hands slightly, and adjusting the camera’s focus ring can be even more troublesome. Use a tripod, and also a remote shutter release whenever possible, to make sure that your camera is kept absolutely still – then all you have to worry about is the wind moving your subject (if you are outside)!
I used what little artistic thought I have, and scattered a few fallen petals on the table to make the background more interesting. Even with an aperture of f/11 here, the depth of field is still relatively small. If shooting a landscape, you would expect an aperture of f/11 to give you a fairly sharp image from front to back.
Another reason for using the tripod is that the smaller your aperture, the longer your shutter will need to remain open for, in order to expose the image correctly. Photography, at its most basic, is about capturing light and recording it, and the amount of light that you capture affects the final image by either making it too bright, too dark, or well exposed. There are three elements to this exposure triangle, which are your aperture size, shutter speed, and ISO setting – as you change one, you will need to change another, in order for your images to remain well exposed. Personally, I usually set my camera to Aperture or Shutter Priority, set my ISO level manually (to keep it as low as possible and avoid unwanted noise in my images – when I remember to, of course!), and then let the camera choose the other remaining setting for me.
The sun coming in to my parents’ living room was very bright, as you can see from the deep shadows to the right hand side of the roses and their petals.
As great as natural sunlight is for illuminating your subjects, it is essentially a very strong light source that shines from only one direction. You can affect the direction by positioning your subject accordingly, when outdoors, or waiting for the Sun to be in a certain position. However, this may not always be practical, so it can often be very useful to use a reflector. This is usually a large shiny surface, that you position on the opposite side of your subject to the Sun, and it bounces some of the light back to give you a more even exposure and prevent very strong shadows from overwhelming your subject. You can use different reflective surfaces, to change the colour of light, and also the intensity of the light you reflect back, but the general principle is the same. In the shot above, there was no reflector being used, but you can see the difference compared to this next shot, when I did have a reflector and reflector stand (Dad) in place.
The reflector bounces sunlight back on to the roses from the right hand side of the shot, bringing light, colour and detail back to the image, where previously there had only been dark shadows.
Obviously it is not always practical to have a tripod with you, or somebody who can hold a reflector up, in which case it is probably best to search for a happy medium between shutter speed and aperture size. You should try to maintain a relatively large depth of field to prevent your point of focus becoming your point of non-focus, but also keep as quick a shutter speed as possible, to prevent blur from camera shake. You can do a few things to steady your shot, such as keep your elbows tighter to your body, lean against a post or wall, or even set your camera down on a solid surface if there is one suitable. There is always the possibility of increasing the ISO setting on your camera, too, but you will want to choose one depending on your camera’s low-light ability so that your images don’t start to contain too much grain.
A perfect example of the pitfalls of taking macro shots hand held.
This above shot was the one I shared on Sony UK’s Facebook page, which prompted this post, and it is actually one of my favourite photos that I have taken so far. However, it does serve as a good example of the problems that shooting macro shots by hand can cause. Firstly, I had not learned my lesson, and was using the aperture wide open, which has resulted in too shallow a depth of field – the central flower should probably be in sharp focus throughout for the shot to be truly effective, but instead just the leaves to the bottom are sharp. It also looks as though my main point of focus is either the flower above it, or the one to the left of it, which is as a result of the difficulty of trying to focus manually whilst keeping the camera completely still. Had I used a tripod, I would also have taken more care over the composition generally, and I would have actually taken a number of shots with different settings, to see what ended up working the best. Unfortunately though, I was rushing too much and did not get the great shot that I think this could have been (relatively speaking of course). Hopefully you might take more heed of my advice than I have done so far, if trying out similar shots…
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