A Scenic World

Disclaimer: Everything you find below is my take on the subject of shooting macros. I have a different style than others, and I don’t mean to profess that “my way” is the right way or the only way – this is more just the thinking behind my way. I’m going to try to approach this from a variety of fronts: from focusing on the subject to focusing on the background and the technical aspects of shooting macro. I’m going to limit the subject to floral and leaf photography for the purposes of keeping it simple (bugs and animals are another story altogether). Questions and comments are always welcome.

What Makes a Good Background?

So, in the previous part of this series, we looked at what makes a good subject. Now we’re going to see what makes a good background, because in many cases, the background is just as – if not more – important than the subject itself. It’s the truly “make-or-break” part of the photo.

A good background can be many things, but the one thing it should always do is complement the subject. Sometimes that means an absence of color – just blackness or whiteness. Sometimes it might be the out-of-focus parts, particularly glowing bits of light. Sometimes it might be other parts of the subject to give context to the subject. And sometimes, there really shouldn’t be any background at all; filling the frame with the subject can provide the best impact of all.

The simplest way to set off the subject is to have a black background. It’s easier to achieve this effect than to achieve white (which I’ll go into in a moment). I wrote a post a long time ago about the ways that I do this, which you can read here.  Generally, if you find a good angle and keep a look out for subjects that have shady areas behind them, you can achieve this effect easily. A tip: use spot metering and make sure that your camera is metering off your subject and not the background. The pros: by providing all of that negative space, they really bring attention to your subject; you can use that negative space to place your subject with the rule of thirds; and black matches nearly everything. The cons: they add nothing of interest.

“Here, Right Here”

The opposite, of course, is the white background. It has the same things going for it (and against it) as the black background, but there’s generally only one way to achieve this: to shoot against the sky (of course, you could bring your own white background, but I’m referring to the ways that I do things, and I’m lazy and only carry what I need). The problem with shooting against the sky is that you can get some serious purple-fringing at the edges and the light generally bleeds around the edges as well, so you have to be really careful with the settings you use. Generally, you should never shoot at wide-open apertures against the sky. Depending on your lens, you might want to stop down to f/8. You also have to be really careful of your exposure. There’s a very decent chance that your camera is going to try to expose for that sea of white and make your subject a silhouette. You might find it easier to switch to manual mode after seeing what settings you camera comes up with. I find that having white backgrounds is much more of a trial-and-error thing than black. Still, it can be effective:

“Sonata in D#”

One of the coolest things about having a DSLR and that large sensor is the shallow depth of field you can achieve. Basically, your subject stays in focus while the background is blurred out. If there are bits of light in the background, you get specular highlights. The parts of the photo that are out-of-focus is called “bokeh.” Depending on your settings, you can really work these into the overall composition of your photo. A long lens with a large aperture will give you big circles of light (although this is dependent on how close the subject is to the lens and how far away the bits of light are). For instance, in this photo, I used a 200mm lens focused as close as it would go and with the widest possible aperture of that lens (f/2.8). There was a car behind the flower, and sunlight was reflecting off of the chrome parts of the car, which made for the specular highlights you see here:

“Dandelion Light”

Using a much shorter lens (35mm) stopped down a bit (from f/2.8 to f/3.5) makes for much different light in the following photo. I realized early on that I wanted to use them in the following photo, but lining up the shot so that some of the interior of the flower showed while still having those pieces of light in the frame made for some tricky maneuvering. Ideally, I think I would have liked to make it seem like the light was coming directly out of the flower, but alas: the sun went behind the horizon before I had a chance to make it work, so this was the next-best outcome.

“Closing Up for the Night”

The way that this out-of-focus light is rendered is an important selling point for many lenses – in general, the higher the lens cost, the more pleasing and regular those lights will be. I’m sure somewhen, somewhere, grown men have come to blows over which lenses provide the best bokeh. I’m not going to touch that issue here except to say that I’m quite happy with how my lenses perform this task.

Sometimes, I flirt with breaking my cardinal rule of “subject-background-and-nothing-else” and try to provide some context for the subject within the photo. Since the main objective is to tell a story with your photo, you often have to include bit players to increase the drama.  The trick here is to still make sure that you still have a clearly-defined subject. One easy way to do this is to shoot as wide-open as possible so that your subject is sharp and the rest is a bit blurry. In the first example, I had found an absolutely beautiful poppy that was being flung about in gale-force winds. At first I tried to wait out the weather, but I think we all know who won that battle. In the end, I decided to try to capture the wind itself by getting both the poppy and the wind-tossed grass behind it in the shot:

“A Poppy in the Wind”

In the next example, there was one bright red tomato hanging on its stem with an array of orange and green tomatoes behind it. It was the contrast of this one vibrant tomato against the rest that caught my eye, so I knew I had to include them in my shot. I used the maximum aperture of my lens to make them appear out-of-focus and clearly in the background:

“Tomatoes”

Finally, there’s one more way to deal with the issue of the background: don’t. Don’t have a background. Fill the frame, from corner to corner, with your subject. This works best, I think, if your subject has strong lines that can still lead the eye around the frame. Diagonals are supposed to be really effective in this regard. Ideally, your subject would have enough interest on its own to hold the photo without a background: colors, textures, repetition, etc. In the first example, this leaf had such a perfectly straight vein through the middle, and one side was red and the other gold, and I felt by throwing off the middle line to one side there was still enough dynamism to carry the photo:

“Leaf Angles”

I have to admit that I usually use this technique with leaves, because I’m so enamored by all the textures and ways those veins interact with the parts between. Especially for a backlit leaf, I’m always reminded of stained glass; including more of the leaf would lessen this illusion, I think. Speaking of illusions, by filling the frame with the subject at hand, you can make it very easy to disguise the true nature of your subject. For instance, in the following photo, there appears to be a subtlely-lit heart. In fact, this is a 1:1 macro of one petal of a small flower.

“We Find Our Hearts in the Most Unusual of Places”

So, there you have it: backgrounds exposed! Next up: the technicalities of shooting macro.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under Photography Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.