Part 5

The close-up world. I think macro pictures are tons of fun. Surprisingly my digital camera takes really nice pictures of macro things. I took some really cool pictures of plants, insects, and trees using macro shots. Macro lenses are important in this type of photography. They can be used universally and come in handy. Telephoto lenses or converters also do the job nicely as well. For most of the creatures that you photograph and it would be nice to get a really detailed image of, but not so nice to be super close teleconverters are a great way to go. Extension tubes and bellows are great for magnification but on the downside they reduce the amount of light the picture can get. Supplementary lenses do not reduce the amount of light transmitted through the camera and therefore are more beneficial in some situations.
Wide-angle lenses for close-up work is best used with a short extension tube. At close range it has the same feeling of an expanded view of the object, but it is at normal magnification. This is fun to use on flowers and other plants close to the ground. There is also minimum light loss so the pictures turn out really well. Tilt-shift lenses make the best use of depth of field. This makes it easier to use a faster shutter speed to capture motion more focused, and make it more still. Making a life-sized object or animal seem much larger than it is, is tons of fun to do.
The quality of an image can be restored by reversing the lens on the camera. The downfall of this is that it makes stop-down metering, manual closing of the diaphragm, and manual exposure control necessary. Electric flash is also a nice thing to have. It is the only viable approach for taking pictures of small animals. Placing the flash away from the camera makes the fake lighting from the flash look much better. A kleenex put over the flash also works. Background light should be reduced by one stop.
Using wind while photographing flowers is a fun thing to mess with. The flow of the flowers captured by the camera with all the colors can make really neat pictures. Hazy or overcast days are best for photographing flowers and they give the best light. White, silver or gold reflectors around the flowers make the pictures color even better. Finding that perfect blossom or group of flowers is also very challenging and time consuming but it is well worth the picture in the end.
Some tips are to: Get close enough so that the bloom occupies most of the frame, sharpest focus should be on the pistils and stamens unless there are other distinctive pictures, use out-of-focus patches of color to frame the main blossom, check the picture area to make sure nothing takes away from the focus of the flower, shoot at large aperture for a shallow depth of field to soften the background.