Getting Up Close

Macro photography is a world apart from landscape or portrait photography. So many things are different when getting close up. Getting an entire subject in focus is sometimes impossible due to the shallow depth of field and magnification.

Using some techniques I've tried in the past, I decided to get up close to some familiar objects to see how the camera would capture them. These photos were not cropped or magnified artificially.

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A tiny seashell on top of a penny.
The blob on the tip of the seashell is a minute grain of sand that I could not even see until I looked at the photo. To give you an idea of how close this is, the shell is about as long as a penny.


This piece of coral was taken with a normal 18-55 mm lens. The penny is for size reference.
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By attaching a reverse ring to the camera, I was able to install the same lens backwards. It's a bit cumbersome since all of the controls for aperture and focus are in the camera and do not function when set up this way, but with a copy stand, lots of light and a little finesse it works.

Here I used the widest mode of the lens (installed backwards) to pull out some detail in the coral. Note the penny for size.

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Getting a bit closer still, much more detail can be seen.

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Finally, as close as I could get with the set up I had. The coral polyp, or round feature in the coral, is 2mm in diameter, so being able to fill up the frame with something that small isn't too bad!
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