Macro photography in your back garden: TOP TIPS AND TRICKS!

in today's video I'm going to take you through the equipment the lighting the techniques and the post-production of how I produce a macro images like these now I've always been a huge lover of outdoor and wildlife photography but I'm only a pretty recent convert to macro but it was fairly recently when I had to do some macro photos on a phone for a feature I was doing for CNET I was honestly blown away by this whole other amazing world that's been hidden right under my nose for this video I am taking it a bit further swapping my phone for my Canon 5d 4 and using canons 100 mil macro lens so also using these macro extension tubes now these are very basic pieces of kit all they do really is move the lens further away from the camera body and in so doing allow for much closer focusing distances which is of course exactly what we want with macro now because there's no glass elements inside these things they're really really cheap in fact this whole set cost me only about 20 quid on Amazon now canons 100 mil macro lens is pretty pricey but by using these cheap extension tubes you can use a much more affordable 50 mil macro and still get great results once you've got your gear it's time to find your subjects and for me that's been one of the biggest pleasures of experimenting with macro you really don't have to go far to find amazing things to photograph in fact I'm starting quite literally in my own back garden in London now I love wildlife so intentionally keep my garden looking pretty wild sure the neighbors aren't too fast but it does encourage all kinds of insects and birds and even a family of foxes that come in from time to time and sleep in the long grass it's really not even a very big space but in macro terms there is an entire world out here actually finding your subject takes a keen eye and patience looking at a wide sieve isn't going to help you instead you really need to focus in on searching around small patches looking at individual leaves and looking out for any signs of movement eventually you'll get lucky and find a critter of some kind clinging to a leaf or hiding away in the grass odd tower of yellow flowers is regularly full of bees and butterflies for example but every time I actually walk over to it they of course naturally just scatter everywhere but I found that by standing here and keeping pretty still then eventually they realize that I'm not a threat and start to come back and that's when I can get my shots even then I find that probably 80% of the insects I find do tend to disappear out of sight long before I'm able to get close enough for a good shot there's really nothing to do except keep at it trying to make your movements fairly slow and steady so they're not frightened by the motion and that's the main reason that I don't shoot with a tripod now I've seen a lot of macro tips videos that say that tripods really are essential pieces of kit but I don't really agree I found that what I'm shooting by the time I've found my insect found the angle that I want got my tripod all set up in the shot ready to go that insect has long since buggered off [Music] [Applause] [Music] instead I just handhold and I can get my shot far far quicker my settings vary but I usually keep my aperture around err fate for the best sharpness my ISO at 100 on my shutter speed no lower than one hundred and fiftieth of a second if Sun is bright I'll up my shutter speed and if it's cloudy I can boost my ISO I also switch quite a lot between auto and manual focusing auto focusing does work quite well sometimes if I use the center point and make sure to keep on refocusing each time I take a shot when I'm getting in really close however I find that the auto focus struggles so I switch to manual and I have a carefully use the focus ring or physically move the camera in and out slightly until I get the best focus just like a portrait of a person I want the eyes to be in sharp focus so that's what I aim for when I'm shooting it can often be difficult to really nail the focus so I tend to shoot in bursts making minut adjustments to the focus so that hopefully at least one of the pictures will look spot-on when I view from a full screen later professionals counter this by using a technique called focus stacking where you take a different photo a different focus point along the insect and then combine them all in post so the whole thing is in focus the problem with that technique is that in order for all the images to stack together you need a a tripod and B you need to make sure that your subject doesn't move at all while you're taking the pictures as a result is something more often done in studio as out in the real world even a slightest of breezes will ruin your shop and for me I do just prefer shooting out in nature and I prefer the look of an image with carefully used depth of field there are many amazing images of insects you'll find online with that front-to-back sharpness there's been achieved using focus stacking but I do find of some of those that they can look a little bit more like a scientific record of a creature rather than an artful beautiful image and that's the real pleasure in macro for me seeing this whole other amazing miniature world and capturing these realistic natural portraits of wildlife you really don't need to get on a plane to find wildlife and you don't need to book an expensive safari just need to get out into your own back garden and if you don't have a back garden then head to any nearby park and start having a rummage around it's amazing what you can find once you start really looking now I love coming to the Woodcroft Wild Base in North London as like my own garden it is pretty wild and overgrown so it does attract a lot of different things but wherever you do go always make sure you're not doing anything to damage the area always stick to pathways and don't go wading into bushes to try and get the shot instead work around what nature has already provided and take the time to find your best shots without disturbing anything [Music] and actually taking the time is the other hidden benefit of macro photography even in a small park like this in the center of an urban environment I have this moments of peacefulness surrounded only by the grasses the trees and the flowers it's an opportunity to slow down take a breath and really relax [Music] I've honestly found it amazing how getting more into macro like this has really helped calm my anxieties it feels incredibly therapeutic and I get to come away with some cool images so it really is a win-win [Music] but more than that it's actually given me such an appreciation of what's right here under my feet I mean yeah I knew there were some birds in my garden and flies and I always assumed that there were probably various insects but it wasn't until I actually took the time to really look up closer the macro lens but I realized not only how many different varieties there are but how amazing and often pretty bizarre a lot of these things look when you actually get up close and you start to learn some of their behaviors as well it's amazing to see how carefully some insects take care of their delicate wings to make sure that they're always in top flying condition or how a crab spider will sit in wait its front legs out stretch waiting for a fly to land nearby and then how quickly it buggers off when an enormous bee shows up instead each of these tiny creatures has its own story to tell and there are endless stories going on at once all around you you and now a word on lighting there will be many occasions when you're shooting when the ambient light isn't really enough and you're forced to either slow your shutter speed right down which isn't ideal as then you'll get a blurry image or ramp up your ISO speed again not good as your images will be full of noise under this tunnel of trees for example it's pretty gloomy but rather than using a really high noisy eye so I'm using flash to light the insects I've got a canon speed light on top angled straight forwards but to soften that light a bit and keep it looking natural I've put on this collapsible mini softbox now this thing was only about 20 quid and I think it works wonders for creating a big spread of light so this would be a very very small light source if you're shooting a portrait of a person but remember that creating soft light is about the size of your light source relative to the size of your subject so when I'm shooting very very tiny subjects like insects this becomes an absolutely enormous softbox the equivalent probably of shooting a portrait of a person with a giant 30 foot softbox I always keep my light in manual mode so I can fine-tune depending on the results they usually start off at 1/8 power and work up and down as needed now we've got the shots let's move over to the post-production in Lightroom and see how of just a few small tweaks we can really show off the subjects so here we are over in Lightroom and I have already picked out three images that I really want to take a closer look at we'll start off with this shield bug that I found up in Woodcroft wild space now so we can see I've mainly focused on the eye it's kept a good amount of detail on the bug itself and I like that it's just on this one plants to have them as very little else going on in the background it makes a very clean image and I'm pretty pleased with this so let's move over to the develop tab very nice and fast on my computer evidently and the first thing that I want to do with this shot is crop in a bit I really want that bug to feel much more of the frame and I think we'll go something like that mostly keeping it a little bit more towards the right third of the frame let's have a look at that I can't you think I'm gonna move that up slightly a bit more like that so there's almost like it's looking into the rest of this dead space which I think it looks pretty nice now the white balance on this I actually don't think already is too bad I think I shot this in JPEG actually which is why I don't have the full raw control so I don't have a lot of control over the color but I do want to just drop that tint a little bit more into the greens and I'm gonna bring the temperature down just a little bit it's to about there already I think that makes it look a little bit more natural okay now actually moving into the exposure and I know that I want to bring the contrast up a tiny little bit just to +5 get a bit more punch the shadows I want to drop who's going to help dark in the background and really kind of isolate the bug if we bring that shadows right up you can see it just makes everything flatten out and go very weird we don't want that's I want to bring it down maybe something around here don't worry about this back of it falling into darkness and I'm going to do some selective edits on that in a moment and the whites I want to bring up a little bit just to help make it pop that little bit more again flick before-and-after already is this shot with a lot more punch to it now texture clarity indie haze I don't want to do any of that to the whole image and instead what I like to do when I'm really trying to show off a bug or an insect of some kind is use selective adjustment so I'm going to bring up my brush make it a little bit smaller yeah it's feathered fully I'm going to reset all of the settings for now and click show mask and I was going to paint in the mask mainly over the eyes in their head and anywhere else where there's actual texture going on around to there I think looks pretty good ok turn that mask off and this is when I want to play around with the texture more because obviously it's all about the texture on this but we got all these tiny little dimples and if we start to bring that slider up you'll see that those become even more obvious they really really stand out if we bring that up and then down you can see there's a huge difference now I don't want to leave it at a hundred that's obviously too much I think somewhere around forty is about right I'm gonna bring the clarity up a little bit again it's just gonna help bring out that detail and really punch up the bug but that's it I'm not gonna do anything with D haze but I am gonna sharpen it a little bit more just to make it absolutely crystal clear when we finally view it now you can play a little bit with the exposure but I actually think exposure is already pretty good on the bug you could even try turning down those highlights just a little bit not very much - five I think is all it needs and that's it for for that edit but I'm just going to add a new brush and I'm gonna brush in just back down here on this very very dark part because in bringing the shadows down before on the whole image this tail section has very much fallen into blackness so what I'm going to do is bring the exposure up a little bit and then going to bring back that shadow detail to somewhere where it was before because there is a lot of detail in it and I don't want to get rid of that and I think that's done a decent job and if we go back out yeah already I'm pretty pleased with how that looks I am just going to change the crop again I'm gonna crop it a little bit closer because I think it can stand it the detail is there the resolution certainly there and I think it's a great looking bug and it should very much be right front and center like that I think that looks pretty decent I could also have a little play with a vignette down here just to bring the eye right to the bug in the middle and I'm pretty happy with that only a very few small tweaks but it very much helps make that bug really pop off at the scene if we have a look before and after I really like what we've done there so I'm going to move on and the next one is this shut off at B now as you can see there's a couple of things one it's a little bit lost in the frame and two it is quite dark but we can fix both those things first of all we're going to crop quite close this time now I really want to get rid of this flower on the left because it isn't really part of the scene it's just there so by cropping in closer we can remove that bring that nice and close and again keeping the be very much of in the left thirds using this negative space to kind of really highlight the be in the middle I might just lift that up a couple of dots just about there I think it looks good now again if I start playing with the shadows and bring that down we start to lose too much of a detail around the B so I'm actually not going to do anything with that I'm not going to bring it up because again I don't really want too much detail in the background on this I actually want to I quite like the fact that it's fallen to black it makes it look like business a bit of a studio shop so I'm going to keep shadows as zero but I'm going to do most of my work on the B again using the brush tool it's going to bring in that brush I want to see the mask wear and applying it we wants it Randy I all would you tell them is fur smaller size and bring it just down that tongue is that I don't know what you call that I probably should know I really wish I knew more about natural different parts of the bug no just turn enough there we go back on but we don't want to see the mask because I really like this shot because you see so much of this minut detail of all the pollen that it's been getting all over its face you see loads of detail in the eye all these tiny little hairs so all I want to do is just enhance that a little bit and I'm gonna bring up the exposure because again as I said before it was falling into darkness a little bit so I want to really make that pop out and again we're gonna use that texture tool bring that up to about 40 I'm upping the clarity just a little bit less than I did before I think just about 10 and I'm gonna bring up again a bit of sharpness it's a lot more than I would do to the whole image if you start applying texture and clarity to absolutely everything in a scene then you get that very very crunchy disgusting fake look so I only like to apply that using an adjustment brush only in select areas and certainly for insects and macro trying to make the eye pop out a little bit more is exactly what you want so you just take a look at before and after with those changes you can see how much it's brightened at that be how much more of that detail we can see particularly all of this pollen it really pops off the page so already I think that looks a lot better but I just don't like down in this left-hand corner how bright these green stems are I think it draws the eye away from the scene a little bit and spoils the look so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a gradient brush gradient filter rather I'm gonna drag that up about there and I'm gonna slowly bring down that exposure just to darken off those stems really focus the eye on the middle of the scene where the beers and I think that's a small tweak but it really really makes a huge difference to this scene overall if we look before and after we can see how the light has shifted from being very very dominant down here on these stems to suddenly being very much focused on the bee itself they're moving on to the last image I want to work with and it's this shot of this long fly whose name I do not know perched on on a bit of leaf now this is a good example of the depth of field I was talking about when you're using such high magnifications because this if we take a look at the info was shot at f 7.1 so normally you get a lot of depth of field with 7.1 because of the magnification is focused very much on the fly and instead we get this lovely out-of-focus very orange summary looking background it looks maybe like a very deep sunset in the distance it's just actually just the side of my shed but because it's been thrown so much out of focus you get this lovely orange gradient to it and I really like that in this scene again I want to do a closer crop on this but I think with this one I actually want to do a 16:9 crop I want this to be a longer scene and I want to put the fly very much over here and really emphasize all of this sunset in inverted commas over here by using that negative space she's gonna go back in and I'm gonna straighten it up as well so it's very much in line with the fly's back which I think looks a lot better and drop it down there we go I think that is a much better looking crop so with this shot I don't really want to do too many changes I love the white balance I love the colors in this so I don't want to change any of that and overall the exposure is pretty good as well I was using my on-camera flash for this with a softbox you can tell because we've got this lovely highlight line going all the way along its body but as before I just want to help give it that bit more punch so I'm going to use another adjustment brush I'm gonna take a look at the mask and we're gonna paint that in over the eye over its body and then all the way down this and we can do this fairly roughly I've got Auto mask on and it does a pretty good job but if it goes over a little bit doesn't matter so much because I'm not changing anything to do with exposure it you're not gonna see that odd halo around it which is pretty much only going to be about textures and sharpness you know add a little bit more here on this leaf small the brush size and just paint up its leg just to touch basically anything that's already in sharp focus I just want to emphasize that a little bit more okay there were masks in place I'm gonna hide it and in my texture slider again I'm going to bring that up I'm going to bring up the clarity and I'm going to bring up the sharpness and just using those three tools suddenly this has so much more pop to it the contrast is there these vibrant colors it's pin sharp as well I just think if we turn that on and off it really does make such a big difference but again because you haven't applied the texture to the whole image it doesn't look too unnatural it just emphasizes what's more it you don't have a look yeah I think it looks pretty good so just like before I find that these green leaves down here are a little bit too bright they're a little distracting but I don't want to bring in a gradient tool because if I just bring in this big block of darkness it applies far too much of the background and starts to look a little bit too fake I'm not really that keen on that so I'm gonna get rid of that was it that one there we go there's two there for some reason I'm gonna get rid of those and instead I'm gonna try and use the HSL tool to selectively change these greens first of all I think I actually want to push them into a little bit more of the deeper emerald green color gets over here they're a little bit too yellow and if we take it all the way to its yellowest point you can see all these tones are sort of blend together and all we've got is different shades of yellow and orange and I actually really like that those green leaves stand out so I'm going to boost that a little bit into this much more deeper emerald the saturation I'm going to leave but I'm going to bring the luminance down and that's it's going to help them draw the eye a little bit less I'm gonna bring it down quite a bit at minus 70 which is a lot but I think without that this is very very bright almost as bright as the fly itself so your eye doesn't really get drawn to the fly in quite the same way but by bringing down the turns of those greens it just helps balance the scene a little more and help the I become drawn to the fly so that's it for the editing um as I say I don't think this is overdoing the edit too much for me these are fairly small tweaks but they go a huge way to really boosting these insects with a really really standout but still keeping them very very natural which is the whole point I like shooting these things in their natural environments so I don't want to do anything that distracts too much from that and I'm definitely really pleased with how these shots have come out so there's some macro if it wasn't evidently clear I really really enjoyed putting this video together hopefully you did too and if you did then please do make sure to hit that like button hit the subscribe button if you don't already and I will see you next time [Music] tickling my leg while I'm doing that it's probably noticeable [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 140,315

Keywords: Macro, Photography, Tutorial, Lightroom, Photoshop, Tips, Tricks, How to, Learning, Nature, Wildlife, Professional, Lighting, Lenses, Lens, Canon, Outdoor, Focus, Bees, Spiders, Behind the scenes, BTS, Flash, London, Garden

Id: OK5PaTTes4Y

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019