Macro photography lighting tutorial: Equipment, settings and ideas for amazing images

in today's video i'm going to show you how i work with flash to take macro images just like these [Music] so i'm talking lighting in this week's video now light is of course everything in photography but particularly applies to macro because it's often when you're out doing macro photos that you are looking in quite dark places such as in dense trees under some shrubs in those circumstances you need to bring in your own light and i do that a lot in my macro photography so that is what i'm going to take you through today so i'm actually back in the queen elizabeth forest park which is where i was in one of my recent macro videos i've come back here because there is such great potential every step that you take there is just amazing greenery everywhere there's amazing plants there's amazing fungus now that conditions are allowing them to come out a bit more so i really thought it was worth coming back spending a little bit more time exploring keeping my eye out and um seeing if i can get anything [Music] as good maybe even better than last time so that's what i'm doing great thing is we're deep into autumn now and it's been raining quite a bit in the past few days which is a perfect storm for lots of funguses to grow that's definitely something that i'm looking out for as i'm walking along all the different forest trails it's definitely noticeable that there's so much more stuff around to see now that we've got a little deeper into autumn i think that's one of the things i like so much about doing macro is that you can come out week after week and as the seasons change it's always something new to photograph of course step one is still finding your subject and that can be tricky when you come into such massive areas so as i said before the thing to do is really to pick an area pick one big space and really try and search around in that area rather than just wandering for mile upon mile just hoping that you'll find something because once you start to really look close at a particular patch of ground that's when you start to really find those tiny little photographs that you want to take i found these two little mushrooms here and they're just poking out of this lovely bed of vibrant green moss i think it looks really really nice i've got my camera on my tripod and as you can see this is my setup i'm focusing on the rear mushroom i've got my aperture f8 shutter speed of a 13th of a second and i put my light off to the right because i want this lovely side light coming in i'll show you what that looks like if we just take a quick shot the great thing when you're working with light like this though particularly when it's off camera so now that we've got the scene set up and we know that we've got at least one shot that sort of works you can then just grab the light and we can move it around so i can maybe place it down here firing sort of up at the mushrooms hopefully creating a sort of under light effect has to see what that looks like again focusing on that mushroom and it's given a very very different effect i don't like it as much i definitely prefer the first one but there is something in that and obviously i could just hold this light like this while taking a shot not while i'm recording so i am going to take a few more shots in this setup now moving the light around and just seeing what works best just found these really great vibrant orange mushrooms in this clearing but looks like they've been eaten away by birds or slugs or something and so they're not looking particularly photogenic but i think around this area generally there are a few more so i'm hoping i can find one that's a little bit more intact and get a shot i managed to find one that doesn't look completely destroyed so i've set up my little scene here i'm just balancing my camera on my backpack and i've just put my light on the floor down here we just have a quick look at the back of camera this is basically the composition that i'm going for now i want to make sure that i'm capturing plenty of ambient light all of the light in the forest so that means i need a shutter speed of about a sixth of a second i'm at f9 for my aperture in order to make sure that the mushroom itself stays nice and sharp but let's just take a look without the flash at what this shot looks like as you can see it's very dark overall and the mushroom does not stand out it's very much in shadow there's not any detail that you can really see um on those um gills underneath so let's just go ahead and turn the light on i'll turn my trigger on i'm at its lowest power pretty much um 128 power let's focus again manually uh not my new auto focus on the mushroom adjust the shot and there is our shot this time with that flash and you can see the huge amount of difference that it makes to bring your own light into a scene so the light that i use for the most part is the godox ad200 these things are pretty popular because they are small they're about the size of a lens or pretty much the size of usual speed lights but um they pack a lot of punch i use these in my actual studio photography when i'm doing commercial shots of products and whatnot but the most important thing for me when i'm working with flash is to make sure that it isn't on my camera now usually if you're using speed lights the thing that you would do is slot it into the shoe on top of your camera and just point that light forwards so i'll just show you the equivalent of what that would look like on my camera okay so let's get that same shot set up doing like this i'm just going to hold my light basically over my lens and the shot is fine but it is quite flat because it's just blasting with light straight forward and as a result you lose a lot of that shadow that contrast but by taking your light off the camera and being able to move it round you can really direct that light you can make it come in from the side you can backlight it you can do all kinds of things and that is how you really really build drama you build that contrast and that's how you get better looking shots so if you've been working with flash if you've been working with speed lights on your camera and you're used to that then i urge you as strongly as possible get that light off your camera and start to move it around your scene start to experiment with how that same subject looks with a light coming in from a different angle because i think you will be as amazed as i was of a difference it can make to your shots yes you will need some extra equipment as you saw on my camera i had a trigger so that my camera can communicate with the light so if you've got a speed light it may be that you need to get a separate trigger for that or if you want to do it on the cheap you can just get a cable a regular flash cable that will connect to your camera and to your flash and that will do the job perfectly well now the eagle eyed among you as well will have noticed that i've got this big orb on the front of it now this is a magmod magstreet and this is just connected with magnets it comes off like this but what it basically does is turn this quite small light source into a slightly bigger one and so doing it creates softer light now it's important to remember that light is light and if you're just shooting bare bulb from your light just like this then this will look exactly the same as any other speed light it's about how you modify that light that's going to make it softer and that is going to change the quality of the light in your photos so by putting this on the front i can control that light a little bit more i can allow it to spread around more create a softer look to my images with less harsh shadows because things like old tree logs like this are always going to be great for different types of fungus um it's definitely the mushrooms that i'm looking out for and in fact i've just seen over here as a whole bunch so let's try and stick to there aren't any footpaths around this area but i'm still just trying to be very careful about where i where i step [Music] but look down here we've got loads more little little mushrooms around yeah it's definitely some some potential around here so i think i'm gonna wander back to where i left my camera somewhere down here and see if i can get a shot here [Music] so i'm back at this little scene and i've got this shot set up as you can see so let's just talk a little bit about flash settings so for this kind of scene there's actually a couple of ways i could go about this it's actually got quite a lot of light falling on this and so if i just say take my exposure to 20th of a second tap to focus actually a little bright so just with the natural light we're actually getting quite a nice shot so i can either just not use flash at all here or i could just try and add in a little bit of flash if i just turn my trigger on just to kind of fill in some of that shadow underneath the other way that i could take this shot is to change my settings so that i'm completely cancelling out all of the natural sunlight and i'm just using my own light whether you want to do that or not is a creative decision i do that a lot certainly with my product photography because i want to make sure that i've got full control over the light i want to know that any light that's in a scene is light that i have basically chosen to put there controlling that light is a really great way of taking much more artistic considered photos but arguably you might not want to do that for more natural scenes like some macro images of mushrooms typically what i'll probably do is take a bit of both i'll do one with flash one without and try all kinds of different settings so that when i get back home i can have a look at those later and i've got the shots to choose from should i want to so settings wise if i did want to cancel things out let's just turn off my trigger and we take our exposure our shutter speed up to say 200th of a second and if we just try and take that shot we can see it's really really dark um there is still you know you can still see the mushrooms but for the most part this is a very very dark frame that needs a lot more light so we go and turn on our trigger haven't changed our settings we take the same shot again with that flash of light suddenly the mushrooms are lit you can see a lot more of those details we've got details on the nice moss around there i'd want to move this light around a bit so i'm going to play it with the scene a little bit but you can see now that we've got much more light we've brought our own light in there and as a result we can control exactly where that falls we can decide whether we want that light coming in from the top and lighting the caps of the mushrooms whether we want it lit from beneath like this that's a decision that we can make now whereas if it was just relying on the sunlight we can only take whatever we can see it can seem really difficult to figure out those settings but it's actually not that difficult because your iso always stays the same for the most part usually it's your base iso iso 100 in my case and my aperture i usually want around f8 because that gives me the best sharpness in the image so then it's just about adjusting that shutter speed to determine how much natural ambient light you want in your shot and then changing the flash settings on your light itself so really those are the only two variables so once you play around with those it actually becomes very easy same again here lovely spiky fungus light off to the right 25th with a second f8 working with light can be a bit of a minefield there are so many different techniques so many different little bits of equipment like those magmod adapters that i've shown so it can seem quite daunting but the thing is is like anything it's a learning curve and once you start getting used to it once you start learning some of those basic techniques you'll quickly find that you start learning more and more and when you start taking even better shots and of course that learning experience is all part of the fan of taking photos that's why we come out here is why we try again and again to get better shots because it's fun to try and learn more it's fun to try and use new techniques to take new better photos but it is important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to do this well it's not exactly true if you completely overexpose a photo so it's white that's wrong but in terms of how your light looks in your image that is a artistic decision that only you can make and so get that light get it off your camera move it around play around with the scene and just try it out [Music] i do think one of my favorite things about coming out and doing i suppose any kind of photography out in nature but particularly macro is it slows you down and it really forces you to like connect with the environment for you to really kind of get on its level and it's incredibly calming incredibly relaxing it's a great way of sort of getting yourself out of the city out of your home put your work worries behind you and just relax into it it's a great wellness activity to do and you can come home with some really nice shots so there's really no reason not to do it [Music] so what i think is a good example of keeping your eye out just been walking along this path and there are leaves everywhere but this one just stood out to me particularly because it's got these really nice sort of water droplets all over it so i'm shooting down as you can see my um my frame is quite close up i'm going to try this both with and without the flash we'll start without going f10 actually let's knock that down f8 a little bit and probably about a second exposure focusing just here and it looks okay but i definitely want to just try this with the light and see if i can get anything better so i've just put my light in place here nothing is changing in my composition but i have increased my shutter speed to 20th of a second aperture f8 iso 100 i've got my light over here camera left at about 1 64th power again exactly the same focusing on that closest droplet and take the shot and with that light we get so much more contrast so much beautiful shadows it really emphasizes the curving sort of decaying nature of the leaf we get those nice highlights catching on the water droplets overall i think this is a much nicer shot with the light so i found another really cute little mushroom it's this tiny little thing but within this whole scene i think it looks really nice it kind of stands by itself um now if i just turn my flash off and just take a quick shot using just the natural light it's quite dark and um the mushroom doesn't really stand out but what i do like i'll just zoom in i know this is a little bit difficult to see in the back of camera the natural light does create this really nice sort of ring around it's sort of bottom of the throat of the frill and i want to enhance that and just allow the mushroom to really stand out so i'm going to turn my flash on um i've currently got it positioned over here off to the side of the mushroom itself so i'm just going to manually focus on the front of the mushroom something like that f8 keeping those same settings because i want that same ambient light to be in the shot i just want to enhance it with my own light so i take that shot and i think that looks a lot better i've just slightly shifted my shooting position and that's just helped the mushroom stand out slightly so composition is still important manually focusing again f8 attempt for the second and there's my shots now i could bring that shutter speed down even more let's see what that does and that's just helping me capture a little bit more of that background which i like i don't want it just to be black in the background i think this is looking like a really really nice shot overall so sometimes i use flash in my macro photography to actually allow me to get a shot that otherwise i couldn't get maybe it's just too dark and i need to bring in some light to even make the subject visible but more often it's what i'm using it to actually get a bit more creative to get much more of a dramatic look to my shots rather than simply just using it to light the scene because again it's about that control it's about making sure that the light that's in there i have put there by intention i'm using the power settings accordingly i'm using the direction of the light i'm using those lighting modifiers that you've seen to really craft that scene so that it looks exactly as i want it to well i think that probably does bring me to an end of today's video but i really do hope that it has been useful to see how i would use flash like this in macro photography really hope that it's sort of maybe broken down some of those misconceptions about flash being either really harsh or just too difficult to work with on location like this because it's really not it's easy to do and it can make all the difference in taking a really great image but if you have enjoyed this video then do please make sure to hit that like button consider subscribing to my channel if you don't already and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 26,833

Keywords: Macro, Photography, Tutorial, close up, Lighting, flash, ambient, led, strobe, speedlite, speedlight, modifiers, magmod

Id: 7qiAUTES7wk

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021