What to shoot in September/October

By Art Wolfe with Jay Goodrich

Maybe it’s time to think small, macro small.  September and October in the Pacific Northwest present wet dew laden mornings which are perfect for photographing tiny intimate landscapes, insects in your garden, abstracting details of a flower into a wash of color, or a spider’s web suspending drops of dew.

When I talk about “macro photography” I’m not limiting myself to 1:1 or greater magnification.  Macro to me is really anything that might fit in my 2 hands. A clump of clover or a close-up of a Macaw’s back showing detail in the feathers, fall into my definition of “macro photography” as does a butterfly’s wing or dandelion seed head filling the entire frame.

People often ask me what I would recommend for a macro lens and honestly I don’t generally carry one; they add too much weight for how often I find myself using one.  Instead, I carry a set of extension tubes, practically weightless when compared to adding another lens to my bag, and at my age, less is definitely more (as in more walking, more shooting and more time out of the chiropractors office!)

I’ve asked Jay Goodrich to provide a few technical details on macro lenses and how extension tubes work:

To understand macro lenses you must first understand how a lens focuses on a subject.  As you twist the focus ring, the glass optics inside move forward and back.  Want to focus closer?  Move the glass further from the sensor.  Want to focus at 1:1 magnification?  (1:1 happens when the object you are shooting is the same size on the sensor as it is in real life such as a quarter or butterfly’s wing filling the frame) Then your lens must be able to move the optics away from the sensor a distance equal to the focal length of your lens (This will vary based on the crop factor of your sensor).  In other words if your 100mm lens can move 100mm from the sensor, you have a ‘macro lens’ able to focus close enough for objects to appear life size on the sensor.  A 100mm macro lens will be able to achieve 1:1 (lifesize) at twice the distance from your subject than a 50mm macro lens would.

But what if your 100mm lens is not a “macro lens”?  That simply means it is not able to move the optics a full 100mm from the sensor.  Perhaps it can only move them 75mm and thus it can’t quite focus close enough to fill the frame with the butterfly’s wing.  An extension tube is spacer that fits between your camera and lens and they come in various thicknesses.  Having no glass at all they do not impact your image quality as a magnifying filter (also used for macro photography) would.  So if you were to put a 25mm extension tube on the back of your “non macro” 100mm lens – you would then be able to achieve the full 100mm (75+25) of extension necessary to photograph your subject at 1:1 or 1x magnification.

So what does Art use in the field?  He will add extension tubes between his 70-200 f4 lens.  Without them, the lens has a minimum focusing distance of 1.2m and a magnification of .21x (about 1/5^th life size).  Adding a 25mm extension tube allows him to move in closer and achieve .42x life size.  Stack additional extension tubes behind the lens and he’s able to focus even closer yet – all without adding an additional lens to his bag.

If you enjoy shooting macro subjects, an investment in a true macro lens is worthwhile.  While extension tubes allow you to “make one” on the fly, they must be removed to allow the lens to again focus on distant objects and to infinity.  You can even purchase a macro lens with enough extension built in to achieve up to 5x magnification – filling the frame with the eye of a praying mantis.

Most of the time stopping down to f22 and keeping your sensor plane parallel to your subject will give you enough depth of field to cover your subject.  If not, you may need to “rack focus”, shooting several images with the focus point first on the leading edge of the subject with each subsequent image focusing a little further into the composition until you reach the furthest point you want in focus.  Later you combine the images with Photoshop or Helicon Focus; the combined image will then look sharp across the entire scene from front to back.

I use macro photography to abstract the patterns, lines and texture found in nature; to give the viewer a different taken on an old subject.  We’ve all seen photographs of flowers, force your audience to think a little, to tilt their head as they wrap their imaginations around your composition.

You can abstract just about anything you find in nature and even man-made objects. By framing tight on your subject you are able to show a pattern that is lost when looking at the whole.  Your image allows a new appreciation for the subject which is unavailable without the photograph to isolate and show only what you, the artist behind the camera, is allowing the viewer to see.

Patterns come from the repetition of shape and textures, thus it is possible to get too close and not show enough of your subject, losing the magic of the pattern you had intended to show. If you love ferns for their delicate pattern of leaves, get in close, focus your attention on just one frond and enjoy the gentle curve of the main stem while playing with the beauty of the individual leaves branching out while ever decreasing in size to either side.  A fully symmetric composition with the frond in the center makes a different, but equally effective statement as drawing the frond out of a corner diagonally, try it both ways to see what you like.

Sometimes if I am lacking for inspiration I’ll create a little vignette, a story, with the elements around me.  On a beach I may grab some bits of seaweed, a shell, perhaps a dead crab or some muscles, and a bit of drift wood.  I’ll loosely arrange these so as not to appear too deliberate or forced and play with the composition.  This exercise can help to open me up to other options around me as I begin to see line and form that I may not have seen otherwise.

A good exercise for anyone, whether you are feeling stuck or full of inspiration, is to walk to a random spot, in your back yard, in the country, in the forest… and just stand there and take in the scene.  Look all around you.  It may take 15 min or it may take an hour, but you will begin to see opportunities on a macro, close up scale, which you may have overlooked in the past.  The stained glass effect of a dragon fly’s wing, the rainbow of colors in a puddle, a sewer grate, the wabi sabi qualities of a dead leaf as it curls and browns.  Photographic opportunities are all around if you open yourself to the possibility of seeing them.

Always keep a sharp eye for any distracting elements in the composition.  Check each of the four corners for bright areas on the edges, twigs, dead leaves, hard edges.  A grouping of pine needles close-up can make for an abstract of Japanese writing; a single pine needle in the corner can blow the whole composition.

As you head out to photograph the macro landscape, ask yourself about the difference between a tight shot of a flower that could be used in a botanical textbook as “figure 7.2”, and an artist’s abstract of that same flower.  When you get in really close, can you start to see a Georgia O’Keefe or Claude Monet’s influence on the composition?  Does the texture make you think of a pointillism painting where the entire scene is composed of dots of color?  Go back and photograph those same flowers, mosses, and leaves you have shot so many times before, even those in your own yard, but do so through a new set of eyes, not looking to record nature but to abstract and challenge the senses of your viewer.