Digital Focus: How to Shoot Small Objects Up Close

Feature: Up Close and Personal

Ever since I saw Raquel Welch battling white corpuscles in the classic 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage, I've been hooked on the photography of tiny things--something called macrophotography. Macrophotography, or close-up photography, is all about shooting pictures of small objects. It doesn't matter if you're taking pictures of your coin collection or bugs in the backyard; if you're trying to fill the frame with something really tiny, it's a macro shot.

You can check out the world of macrophotography with your very own digital camera. Most cameras have a macro mode (also called close-focus) that lets you get a sharp focus within just a few inches of the subject. When you get that close, especially if you zoom in, you can get very cool results. Intrigued? Let's try taking some close-ups this week.

Remember the Tulip

Most cameras don't automatically close-focus. Instead, you need to activate that setting by pressing a button on the camera body. Most manufacturers use the familiar tulip symbol to indicate macro mode--look on the camera body, or perhaps on the LCD menu system, for this symbol. Remember, though: When you're done shooting your close-ups, turn off the macro mode or your normal photos will be blurry. Macro focusing works only when you're within a few inches of the subject.

Watch Out for Parallax

When you swoop in for your close-up, you may encounter a digital camera oddity: parallax. With most digital cameras, the optical viewfinder is not in exactly the same place as the lens; it's a few inches away. So if you compose your picture by looking through the optical viewfinder, your subject will be offset in the frame. This is referred to as the parallax phenomenon.

You can solve this problem in two ways. If you prefer to use the optical viewfinder, look for correction marks in the eyepiece. These lines help you adjust for the fact that when you shoot close up, the viewfinder and lens won't line up. But there's an even better solution: Since the LCD shows you exactly what the camera lens is seeing, use that display to frame your close-up photo.

Maximize Your Depth of Field

Shooting close-ups highlights another unusual aspect of photography. The closer you get to your subject, the narrower your depth of field--the total range within the photo that can be in sharp focus--becomes. When you shoot an ordinary photo, your depth of field is several feet, allowing you to get a whole bunch of things in sharp focus. When you're only a few inches from your subject, though, the depth of field drops precipitously to just an inch or two. When you're really close, the depth of field may even be as small as a fraction of an inch.

The solution? If your digital camera allows it, switch to aperture priority and select the biggest value you can, like f/16 or f/32. By selecting the largest aperture value, you're maximizing the depth of field. The advantage of a very narrow depth of field is that the background will be blurry and indistinct--which is usually a nice effect when shooting ultra close-ups.

Try a Macro Lens

Finally, if you're interested in taking close-ups, try a set of macro lenses from a company like Tiffen. You can get screw-on or snap-on macro lenses for most digital camera models, and they allow you to magnify your close-ups significantly more than the built-in lens that comes with the camera.