Macro Photography
The Equipment
Most insects are small, so you’ll need equipment to magnify them. You can use a long lens with close focus of less than 10 feet, fit a diopter lens to the front of a regular lens, fit macro extension tubes between a lens and the camera body, or use a dedicated macro lens. Long lenses with focal length of at least 300mm have the advantage that you can take a photo while still at a distance from the insect, which makes approach much easier. Extension tubes are simply hollow tubes with no glass in them which are mounted between a regular lens and the body of the camera. The effect is to reduce the minimum focus distance of the lens – if the lens previously could focus no closer than 10 feet, then with extension tubes it might now focus as close as 5 feet. They come in different sizes and can be stacked on each other; since there’s no glass involved, there’s also theoretically no degradation of the image. I’ve never used diopter lenses so I can’t comment on them.
However none of these approaches to increasing magnification can compete with a dedicated macro lens. These lenses are typically the sharpest and clearest lenses in any manufacturer’s inventory – other lenses will be longer, more expensive or faster, but because of the obviousness of any optical aberrations in a macro photo, the macro lens will have the best optical characteristics of sharpness and clarity – something which makes them fairly unsuitable for portrait photos, since they’ll show up every fault of the subject! When pointed at an insect, such a lens can show up the very fine details like the hairs on the body, facets of the lens of the eyes and scales on the wings. Read the rest of this page »