Macro Photography

These notes were made to accompany a presentation I made at Bromsgrove Photographic Society in April 2025.

A few years ago I made a presentation at Bromsgrove Photographic Society entitled “50 ways to take a macro”, in which I talked about (and demonstrated) lots of “alternative” techniques for taking macro photographs (other than the obvious one of “buy a macro lens”). Since then, my interest in macro photography has progressed somewhat, and my needs, equipment, techniques, and skills have all changed. This time, therefore, I will talk less about “here are all the possible things you CAN do to take a macro photograph” and more about “what information is actually useful to someone wanting to get into macro photography”.

What is Macro Photography?

The original definition was a photograph where the image on the sensor or film is as large or larger than the subject – in other words, where the lens is magnifying rather than reducing the image it projected. This happens when the distance from the lens to the subject is between 2f and f, where f is the focal length of the lens.

However, this definition gets confusing when sensors of different sizes are compared – you could have two identical images, one shot on a “full-frame” camera and the other on a micro-43 camera, where one was considered macro under the above definition and the other was not. Therefore these days, to quote Wikipedia, “In the digital age, a “true” macro photograph can be more practically defined as a photograph with a vertical subject height of 24 mm or less.”

For my purposes, if you are taking a photograph of something about the size of a damselfly or smaller, and you are composing your image so that the subject is large in the frame, then you will find the methods and techniques of macro photography that I am describing here useful.

So how (and why) have my views changed since my last talk? Firstly, I’ve started doing a LOT more focus stacking (of which more later). I’ve also been doing an ongoing project of trying to photograph at least one “critter” per day around the house or garden, many of which have been macro subjects, so I have been doing a lot more macro photography in general. Finally, I have changed my camera setup to the point where it feels like I have a macro system that feels pretty close to perfect, so why would I want to experiment with all the other, less convenient and lower quality, options? Modern macro lenses give you magnifications as good or better than most of the “hacks”, with the benefit of autofocus, aperture control, image stabilisation, and none of the downsides of the weird hacks described in “50 ways”. Of course, this convenience does come at a price.

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Why would you want to take macro photographs?

There are lots of possible reasons, but some that apply to me are listed below.

See the unseen

This is a bit of a common theme for me in my photography. A lot of what I enjoy photographing is subjects that cannot be observed without the use of a camera – perhaps they are too dark (e.g. astrophotography), too fast (e.g. high speed photography), or, as in macro photography, too small. The detail you see when looking at a macro photograph of (say) a spider is simply invisible to the naked eye. Get closer still to see the scales on a butterfly’s wing, or the facets on a grain of sand.

Learn about nature

If you spend a lot of time looking for macro subjects, you will soon start to learn what insects hang out where (and when), how they behave, what they eat, where they breed, and so on.

Make pretty pictures

Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder… but it is also in the eye of the dragonfly… or the bee holder.

Because it’s a challenge

Another common theme for me and my hobbies. Sometimes I enjoy the challenges, the problem solving, the building (and/or inventing) of the required tools, as much as the end results. I prefer a home-made solution to an off-the-shelf one – and macro photography is full of challenges that lend themselves to such creative solutions.

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Equipment

Macro lenses

Although I do discuss some alternatives below, for most general macro photography, life is going to be a lot easier (and results a lot better) using a lens that is designed for the purpose. A macro lens will be designed to be able to focus close enough for 1:1 magnification or even more, with an accurate and sensitive focus system, and well corrected optics.

Macro lenses CAN be used for general photography too (well, most can), but they are not always at their best on larger subjects – in particular the focus can be a bit slower than on a standard lens. Conversely, some non-macro lenses – especially telephotos – can be useful for “macroish” work if their minimum focus distance is small enough. A damselfly, for example, does not require 1:1 magnification to fill a frame, and a telephoto lens that can focus at 1m may be better than a specialist macro lens for such subjects.

Which macro lens?

Macro lenses are available at different focal lengths – the most common being (in 35mm equivalent terms) around 50mm, around 100mm, and around 180mm. Canon make some excellent 100mm macro lenses as well as a 180mm macro, Nikon a 105mm lens (they call it micro rather than macro). For my Micro43 system, Olympus sell 30mm, 60mm, and 90mm macro lenses (corresponding to 60, 120, and 180mm 35mm equivalent).

Longer focal lengths tend to be larger and heavier, but they also give you a larger working distance (the distance from the front of the lens to the subject). This may not sound significant, but having a longer working distance means you are less likely to disturb your subject, and also make it easier to get light onto your subject without it being blocked by the lens.

I don’t have experience of every macro lens available, but I have used the following

• Canon 65mm MP-E – specialist lens for ultra close ups
• Canon 100mm EF – ok
• Canon 180mm EF – good working distance but slow focus
• Canon 100mm RF – a good lens
• Olympus 60mm macro – never really got on with it. Small and fiddly, working distance a bit short
• Olympus 90mm macro – fantastic lens
• Laowa 24mm macro probe – niche lens

Vintage manual-focus macro lenses may be another option to consider. Unless your camera supports focus bracketing (discussed below), autofocus is not particularly helpful in a lot of macro work, and a vintage macro lens may be a lot cheaper. You’ll need a mount adaptor to attach to your modern camera.

When is a macro lens not a macro lens?

It used to be very common to find a consumer-grade zoom lens marked as “Macro” with a button you could press to unlock an extra bit of rotation on the lens to focus just a bit closer. Even with the button pressed, they still get nowhere near 1:1 magnification. As a rule of thumb, if it’s a zoom lens, it’s probably NOT a true macro lens! To be more certain, check out the maximum magnification from the lens specs (some lenses will report this on the lens itself). For true macro, this should be 1:1.

Alternatives to macro lenses

In my earlier presentation “50 ways to take a macro” I discussed a number of ways to get macro magnifications without using a macro lens. They all work, and can have their place, but none are as convenient as using a proper macro lens. Some may be cheaper though…

• Extension tubes fit between a standard lens and your camera, to allow the lens to focus closer. The amount of extension needed depends on the focal length and the original MFD, but 30-50mm of extension should get you close to 1:1 on a 50mm lens. Probably the best “alternative to a macro lens” idea, and can be useful for reducing the minimum focus distance on telephotos too.

• Diopters fit on the front of a standard lens to allow the lens to focus closer.

• Bellows act rather like adjustable extension tubes, and can give extreme magnifications, but at the expense of being bulky and really only suitable for use on a tripod with a static subject. Vintage bellows are likely to be a better deal than new ones.

• Reversed lenses – mount a standard lens in reverse for extreme magnification and extreme inconvenience
• Adapted lenses – use a lens designed for something else entirely, such as a microscope objective

Other equipment

A macro rail can be useful when working with a static subject for making very fine adjustments to focus, much more accurately and repeatably than using the focus ring on the lens. If you are focus stacking, a macro rail is one way of making the tiny focus adjustments needed between shots – it’s even possible to buy (or make) a motorised focus rail that automates the process. For really tiny subjects this approach is still the best, but for most cases these days I prefer to hand-hold and use the camera’s focus-bracketing capabilities.

A “plamp” is a handy tool for holding plants steady while you photograph them (or, more commonly in my case, an insect sitting on them). Wimberly make the original, but you can make your own. Mine is made from a disassembled tabletop tripods that I never found particularly useful.

A tripod is can be handy, though I seldom use one these days if I can get away without it. Because you tend to be working very close to your subject, finding somewhere to put the tripod feet can be tricky, and I find a tripod with an adjustable horizontal arm can be useful, such as the one on the photo below. If anyone from BPS is reading this, the tripod in the photo below is available free to the first person to ask for it (you can make a small voluntary donation to club funds if you want). Now been claimed.

If using a tripod, a geared head can be useful for framing the subject properly. The one pictured below from Arca Swiss is excellent, but also very pricy.

While I seldom use a tripod, I do quite often use a monopod to steady things a little (and to take some of the weight). I have a device called a “SpeediGimbal” that couples the monopod to the camera which can be assembled and disassembled in an instant.

Unless you are doing all of your macro photography outdoors and/or on a tripod, you will probably need to add light (see below for further discussion). Macro flashes and ring flashes are designed to fit at the front of the lens to be conveniently placed for macro use. Ring flashes may be more compact but multi-head macro flashes are much more versatile, allowing the angle of light to be adjusted.

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Challenges in macro photography

Focus

The depth of focus in a typical macro shot is tiny – maybe just a millimetre, or even less for extreme magnifications. Macro subjects are also typically small, of course, but often not small enough that the depth of focus covers the entire subject from front to back. To solve this dilemma, there are a few possible approaches.

• Accept it (but judges typically won’t). Make it a feature, perhaps…
• Careful framing – if the subject co-operates. Many insects are long and thin, and if you line them up so the length is parallel to the film plane, the whole body will be in focus. But all your photos can start to look a bit similar…
• Smaller apertures – but there’s never enough light, and diffraction starts to be an issue…
• Focus stacking – of which more later…
• Tilt-shift lenses? Not something I have tried…

Because the depth of focus is so small, it means that the tiniest change of the lens focus, or motion of the camera towards or away from the subject, will dramatically change the focus. Traditionally, this meant that a solid tripod was needed, and a macro rail was very useful to make the finest possible focus adjustments. These days, I almost always shoot hand-held, shooting a large burst then discarding all the shots that were not in focus.

Diffraction

If you think you can solve the limited depth-of-field by using a really small aperture (even if you had enough light), think again. When light passes through a really small aperture, it tends to bend (the physics of why is beyond the scope of this article), the net effect of which is that details start to get fuzzy once you use an aperture smaller than the “diffraction limit” aperture. The exact value of this limit depends on the focal length, magnification, and your tolerance for fuzziness. Online calculators exist – for example the one at https://www.photopills.com/calculators/diffraction-macro, which will tell you that for a full frame camera using a 100mm lens at 1:1 magnification, diffraction effects will start to be visible at f/11.

Light

Getting enough light on your macro subject can be a challenge. In bright sunlight, outdoors, there may be plenty of light but your subjects are also likely to be at their most active and least co-operative. Otherwise, you are probably going to need to add light. Slow shutter speeds are not usually an option as the tiniest bit of camera movement will lead to unsharp photos, and wide apertures are not your friend because you need all the depth of focus you can get. If your camera has a built-in flash, or you have a hotshoe-mounted external flash, it may not work well for macro because the subject is so close to the lens that the lens will block the light from the flash. You can use external flash (or external continuous lights), but the most convenient solution – especially if you are wanting to be able to chase your subjects around the fields – is to mount the light source(s) to the front of the lens. Ring lights, ring flashes, and macro twin (or triple…) flashes.

Camera shake

The effects of camera movement are magnified along with your subject. You can use a tripod (and a remote release), but my preferred solution is to rely on flash (or fast shutter speeds) to freeze the motion. Image stabilisation can also help, but with one caveat – in my experience it doesn’t play nicely with focus stacking, so if you are planning to stack, turn off IS.

Image stabilisation and stacking

I turn off image stabilisation when I am shooting a burst that I intend to stack, relying instead on either flash or a suitably high shutter speed to avoid camera shake. If image stabilisation is enabled, I find that the images do not align so well in the stacking process. Exactly why this should be I am not sure – something in the way the IS process works causes some minor image distortion that is not normally noticeable, except when trying to exactly overlay the frames.

Finding subjects

Most of my macro photography involves taking photos of insects, but other subjects are available (and many have the advantage of not moving). Sticking with nature, macro shots of plants (or parts of plants), mosses, and fungi can all be very effective. I’ve seen some amazing macro shots of grains of sand. I also used to enjoy taking “Guess the closeup” shots of (parts of) common objects.

Subject movement

If you are wanting to use focus stacking, you need your subject not to move between the frames in your burst. You can reduce the likelihood of movement by taking the burst as quickly as possible, by taking lots of bursts in the hope of getting one burst where the insects stops still for a moment, or by learning a bit about the behaviour patterns of your subject to predict when it might be less likely to move. For example, most insects will be a lot less likely to move if you can take them early in the morning before they have warmed up.

If it’s windy outside, then macro photography becomes a lot more challenging. Even if you are not planning to stack, just keeping your subject in frame and in focus is tricky if the plant it is sitting on is swaying in the wind. Sometimes I use a home-made “plamp” to hold a plant steady – usually I just give up and shoot something else (or indoors) for the day.

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Focus stacking

I’ve mentioned this a few times now, so I guess it’s time to go into a bit more detail about what it is and how to do it. Put simply, focus stacking involves taking multiple photos of your subject focussed at slightly different distances, then combining them to get a result with the entire subject is in focus. In this way, even if your subject is too large to get all of it in focus in a single shot, you can end up with an image that is sharp from head to wingtip.

Some cameras support focus stacking within the camera itself – once enabled, you just focus on the front of the subject, press the shutter button once, and wait a bit while the camera automatically takes a series of shots (moving the focus between each shot) then combines them, finally writing out a single image to your memory card (or writing an error message to the screen saying that stacking failed).

Personally, even though my cameras do support this option, I prefer not to use it, but instead shoot a burst of raw images and then stack later on my computer. There are a few advantages of doing so, the most significant being that I can cope with some situations that the in-camera stacking can’t, such as subject movement or poor initial focus, by excluding some of the frames from the stacking process or manually directing the stacking process to select which frame from the stack to use for a particular part of the image.

On my camera, there is an option called “focus bracketing” (not to be confused with the “focus stacking” option) that will take a burst of shots while moving the focus between each shot, but without then going on to stack the images. The number of shots in the burst, the delay between shots (to allow a flash to recycle), and the distance the focus is moved each time are all configurable.

If you don’t have this option on your camera, an alternative technique is to select the highest frame rate “motor drive” option that your camera supports, and just hold down the shutter to take a burst while simultaneously leaning in slowly very slightly. You don’t want to move much – just the distance between the front of your subject and the back.

Focus stacking and nature rules

If you are intending to enter nature shots into a competition, you may wonder whether focus stacking counts as unacceptable image editing. Obviously, the exact rules may vary from competition to competition, but all the ones I have seen have explicitly permitted focus stacking.

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My macro setup

Over the years I have collected and used quite a variety of macro equipment, most of which I still own – but 99% of the time these days I use the following setup.

• Olympus OM-1 (Mark 1)
• Olympus 90mm 3.5 macro (maximum magnification 2x)
• 2x teleconverter
• Godox MF12 macro flash x3, with X1 trigger
• 3d-printed flash ring mount.
• Laser cut diffuser (from old dog collar)
• DxO PureRaw noise reduction and Zerene stacker

Taking these in turn:

Olympus OM1 Mk I

I like the OM micro-43 system for its small size and weight, and excellent capabilities. The improved AF tracking of the Mk II is not needed for my macro use, so I keep the macro rig permanently mounted to my Mk I and use the Mk II for other wildlife work. I have one of the custom sets configured for the settings that I use for 90% of all my macro work. One key ability is the focus bracketing mode that will take up to 100 shots (probably more, but that’s as high as I ever go) adjusting the focus slightly between each shot. There’s an option to add a small delay between shots to allow a flash to recharge, which I have set to 0.1s

OM M.ZUIKO 90mm f3.5 Macro IS PRO

This lens gives a decent working distance even at high magnification. I usually have the 2x teleconverter attached too which doubles the working distance for a given magnification (or vice versa), though I will take it off for larger critters. This lens can focus at 2x magnification (equivalent to 4x on a 35mm sensor), and the 2x converter doubles that again. That’s more magnification than I ever need…

Godox MF12 flash units (x3)

These little wireless flash units have transformed my macro usage. I had twin-head macro flash units from Canon and Olympus before that relied on a wire from the hot-shoe unit to the flashes, and they were such a pain that I hardly used them. These ones I use all the time. I have set it up as a “dumb” manual flash (otherwise it’s too slow to keep up with the 0.1s recycle time that I allow). At 1/32 power and below it can keep up with the 0.1s pauses for 80 shots in a row. The flash heads can be easily removed and placed (or held) in other locations if desired – for example to illuminate an insect’s wings from the rear…

3d-printed flash mount system

This is easy to mount and dismount – though I seldom dismount it – as it clips on to the bayonet lugs intended for the lens hood. Sometimes I will remove the diffuser (cut from a “Buster collar” aka “Cone of shame”) if I am focussing so close that it gets in the way.

The standard flash mount that comes with the MF12 kit is similar, but screws onto the lens filter mount instead. This works, but is a bit annoying to mount and dismount. It also did not have any facility for mounting a diffuser.

If anyone wants to print their own, the model is available here (or, if you are a BPS member, just ask me and I will print one for you!)

DxO PureRaw

I almost always run the raw images through this before stacking, if I had to raise the ISO at all. DxO software can be found here.

Zerene Stacker

I’ve found this gives good results without any tweaking 90% of the time (provided you feed in good images). Other software is available – you can stack using photoshop too, but when dealing with large stacks (80 images is normal for me) dedicated stacking software is easier. See here for more information.