Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets

Chapter 5. Close Ups

This is the place to get up close and personal with small subjects – photographically speaking, that is. Learn how to picture them life-size and larger than life.

True Macro Photographs

For true macro photographs, you need a macro lens, as opposed to the macro or close-up setting on a zoom lens. Macro lenses let you get much closer to a subject than zoom lenses that have a macro or close-up setting. This picture of a newborn butterfly was taken with a Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens, which offers tremendous magnification – much like a bellows system does for an SLR camera. It's a specially designed, manual focus macro lens that actually lets you fill the frame with subjects as small as a grain of rice.

The remaining photographs in this section were taken with the more commonly used macro lenses:50mm and 100mm. The main difference between these two lenses is that the 100mm lens provides a greater camera to subject distance, so you don't frighten skittish subjects, such as butterflies.

Some of the pictures in this section appeared in my coffee-table book, Flying Flowers.

Steady Your Shots

Macro lenses exaggerate camera shake, as do telephoto lenses. To reduce the chance of a blurry ...