Hey Everyone!  Hope you had a great week! This week I wanted to talk or share my thoughts on Macro Photography. Now I'm no expert and have recently acquired another Macro lens. I've had several over the years. But I've got one to add to my Landscape Photography Kit. So if I'm out and about and the light has gone bad I still can do some Macro Photography. Some really close up shots. So this blog will be mainly about gear. So lets start with the first question.

What is Macro Photography? Macro Photography is when the object size is the same size on the sensor or 1:1 Ratio or better.  So if your have a one centimeter object that your taking a photo of it will take up 1 centimeter on your sensor. What does all that mean? Not much to you and me except that you can focus real close. You can take photos of bugs and spiders and they take up the whole screen on your viewfinder without cropping the photograph to make it large.  When your shooting Macro you are shooting a whole new world that you can't usually see with your eyes or that you ignore altogether. Very Cool. 

What lens do I use to do Macro Photography. If you don't have a dedicated Macro Lens I would start with extension tubes.  Extension Tubes are put between your lens and a camera and let you focus closer.  They are inexpensive and don't have any glass in them so they won't effect the quality of your image. You can get a good set of three for under 50 bucks. You can use all three or stack them to get the effect you want. Macro Lenses come in a variety of focal lengths and price points. And as with everything in Photography you get what you pay for. But you can get some good gear on the cheap to start out.There are some third party lenses that are very inexpensive but they are manual focus only. Dedicated Macro lenses are versatile remember these lenses can be used for other stuff too. A 105mm Macro is an excellent focal length for portraits and is used by many in the portrait industry for head shots. The focal length as it pertains to Macro Photography will determine your working distance to your subject. The longer focal length you will have more distance between you and your subject the smaller the less working distance. Make sure you put into consideration on the type of camera your are using. A crop sensor will have to multiply the focal length by 1.5 to get the working focal length. A 50mm will act like a 75mm on a crop sensor camera. 100mm seems to be the sweet spot for premium Macro lenses but they come in all focal lengths. But remember to be a true macro it must magnify at a 1:1 ratio no mater what the lens says on the side of it. Some cheaper lenses say they are macro but aren't they may get close to the macro ratio but not quite. I have owned a 105mm macro when I shot Nikon and it was a excellent lens I sold that one and eventually got an older 60mm nikon lens that was also a good lens  but when I got rid of all of my Nikon gear that was the last lens that I held onto and used an adapter to fit it to my Sony cameras and used it quite a bit. I then sold it and was without for a while until I just purchased a used Sony 50mm f2.8 lens which I like very much. I have just started to play with it again that's why this blog was started.  These lenses can be expensive and I hear there are good third party lenses from companies like Tamron that make good ones. 

Accessories for Macro.  When shooting Macro photography the closer you get to a subject the more light you need. One of those Physics things. So to add light you can use artificial light like an LED light or a Flash. They make LED and Flashes that attach to the front of your lens and then go to your hot shoe of your camera. You can also just use a regular flash. Almost any will do you don't have to spend a lot of money on these because you will be using it in manual and not TTL. So you can use a basic flash that you can get for 60 bucks or so. A diffuser will also be handy to make that small flash look huge to the little object that you will be take a photo of. Now if you're going to be using your flash off camera you will need some sort of trigger  or cord to get the flash off camera. These can be inexpensive also.

Thats about all that you will need to shoot Macro and you probably have most of these things already in your photography arsenal. So get them out and dusted off and start using . My next blog on Macro will be about the how to do the macro shots not on gear. So until next week get out and start shooting.