You may have heard about Macro photography or Close-up photography used basically for capturing little creatures like bugs or parts of a flower. You may want to try that, but also, you may want to get creative. Or maybe you are locked at home or too lazy to go somewhere in nature. In this case, turn your eyes around your room and see what seems good to become a nice picture. Next thing you do is to try building a little studio on your table.
Things you need for your Macro Photography Home Studio:
– little tripod
– white and black background (and maybe some other colours if you like)
– 1 lamp, but better 2 lamps
Before you can get those things, you can already start shooting something like this:
Note: The “blury” part of macro photos you notice is the result of DOF effect in macro shooting (see glossary).
Now that you have the 3 elements requested (tripod, background, lamp), lets start using them.
One rule in photography is about how busy the background is. If you take a picture of your object with the library behind, for example, the person who looks at the picture will loose the concentration over the subject of the photo (the object) by being distracted because of the many colors and shapes of the books.
Also, the light in your room is not to compare with the light outside (its darker, right?), and then you can control the amount of light you need, and the direction of it (to cast the right shadows) with the small lamps not the one from the ceiling. Also, never use the flash in a macro shot if you can’t decrease it’s power and the test shots end up overexposed.
Since the light is not natural, consider using the custom white balance function of your camera by taking a picture of a known grey reference under the same lighting, and then set that (incorrect WB can create unsightly blue, orange, or even green colour casts, which are unrealistic).
As an example of what I’m talking about, lets see the picture of a film roll. Here, the white background I used is glossy, so the films reflection is very powerfull.
