From the course: Photography Foundations: Macro and Close-Up

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From the course: Photography Foundations: Macro and Close-Up

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Welcome

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- Hi, my name is Ben Long, and welcome to Foundations of Photography: Macro and Close-Up. We spend our days interacting with the world at a particular scale, a scale we all share and understand. In our every day scale, small is something I can hold in my fingers and big is something I can crawl inside. As photographers, we usually build pictures around this sense of scale, but there's another scale that you can work at photographically, a scale that you can't actually see in every day life, a scale that might surprise you with its depth and richness. That scale, of course, is the very small, and the very small is the realm of the macro and close-up photographer. In this course, we're going to explore all of the fundamentals of shooting the very small, as we work from shooting simple close-ups to shooting macro shots will full detail and clarity. We'll start with gear that you already have, shooting that a scale that's not too far removed from your every day experience. Shooting close-ups is a great way of getting a different take on areas and subjects that you might already be familiar with, and some of the practices and techniques that you employ in close-up photography are the same ones you use for macro photography, so it's a great way to prepare yourself for diving into more extreme magnifications. Next, we'll ease you into macro photography by showing how you can easily modify your existing equipment to make it capable for macro work. From there, we'll beef up your arsenal of macro gear by looking into extension tubes, close-up lenses, and bellows. Of course, serious macro shooters use dedicated macro lenses so we'll look in-depth at how to choose a macro lens before diving into all the techniques you need to know to get the most out of whatever macro lens you choose to work with. Along the way, we'll cover some lighting and aesthetic tips, before we finally head into the extremes of macro photography, as we explore focus stacking to create images that simply weren't possible just a few years ago. Macro photographs can be a fascinatingly different view of the world, and one of the best things about shooting macro is that you can start building an extensive macro portfolio without ever leaving your house. Macro expands on the photographic skills that you already have, and you may find that after working for a while with the very small, you will begin to see the full-scale world a little differently. So get a camera, and some tiny subjects, and let's get started.

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