Thank you to Melissa of Melissa Brewer Photography for today’s fun post teaching you macro photography on a budget.

Hey everyone! This is a fun photography technique called “poor man’s” macro. I don’t know about you but I LOVE macro close up photography. It’s just so fun and brings things into a whole new perspective. However, I can’t justify going out and buying a macro lens. It just doesn’t have a place in my business. Never fail though, there’s a way around it for us “frugal” photographers.

First, let’s talk technical. You’re going to need a d-slr for this and a prime lens. By prime lens I mean it can’t zoom in and out. Also, it must have the f-stop controls on the lens. The lens I always use for this is my trusty 50mm. It never fails me!

Now, to do poor man’s macro all you have to do is, take your lens off, turn it around, and hold it in place. Yep. That’s it. Well, almost.

Hey there Angie, could you please take the 50mm lens off my camera.

Thanks dear, now turn the lens around and show all the people how to hold it the “right” wrong way.

Isn’t she great. Let’s move on.

You now have a macro lens. Before you start shooting you need to adjust your f-stop on your lens to where you want it. I find a good place is around f4. For your shutter speed you’re going to want something kinda quick like 1/125 or higher. We want a pretty quick speed because of how we are going to focus. Now that our lens is backwards we can’t just use our focus ring and we definitely can’t auto focus. What you have to do is get really close to your object and then slowly, I repeat SLOWLY, move forward and backward until the image is in focus. The best thing to do is just hold your shutter down as you move forward and back because you gain and lose the focus so quickly.

Now that you’ve got the shot the image must be processed. Well, if you want to go for a soft look you won’t need to but, to really get them sharp they’re going to have to be processed. Here’s an image SOOC (straight out of camera).

Of course, we can make it look better than this in camera by getting our exposure right but, the image will be lacking a lot of contrast and it will be very soft. When processing my poor man’s macro images I generally just use Lightroom or camera raw in Photoshop. I bring the exposure up, add some black, lots of contrast, and plenty of added clarity. Then, when I open the image up in Photoshop, I always run a high pass sharpen. It really helps make the lines pop! So, here’s the same image after it’s been processed.

Much better!

Poor man’s macro is a great tool to know about and you can come up with a lot of different looks with this one technique.

You can get super soft/dreamy images.

You can get super sharp detail images.

You can see tiny little flowers and objects like you’ve never seen them before.

You can also get some great abstract shots.

Another great thing to do with poor man’s macro images is to put textures on them. They completely transform them. You can go from “Oh cool” to “Oh, is that a painting?”.

So, one final note before I go. Yes, you can get dust into your camera when doing this so I don’t advise doing this somewhere windy or really dusty. Yes, you may need to clean off your lens afterwards before putting it back on your camera. Yes, it will take a minute to get a hang of. Yes, you will get addicted for a while. Yes, you can shoot things other then flowers and leaves. In fact, I encourage you to do so. Try to find things with lots of texture or abstract designs like rope, tires, or carpet. Last but not least, don’t be afraid to get down on your belly and look at the world from a whole new perspective!

And most of all have fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Guest Bloggers, Photography Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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