How to Use a Macro Lens

Video Transcript

"Hello hello this is Tom Sapp. We're going to talk about how to take a photograph with a macro lens today. Now things have changed a little bit over the past couple years. When I first started with film I had a Mamiya 645 and I had a macro lens that had a conversion factor to it and I can't tell you how much of a pain that was. Every time you wanted to take a photograph you had to hold up a chart and then adjust for the amount of light that you're losing because of the macro feature on the lens and what that meant is the front element was getting further away from the back element like you saw. I think we did another video before where you have a back element, front element and when you zoom out the front optic actually comes further away from the rear element which causes more light to be needed to get through the lens and actually take the photograph and then you have to correct for that by using a chart and adjusting your camera. Now it's so much easier and I can't tell you how much enjoyable, how much more enjoyable it is when you're using just a simple digital macro lenses. Like for instance this one is the 65 or the 60 millimeter macro from Nikon, an absolutely beautiful lens and I can show you an example here. Macro means it is blowing it up, this frog was not this big but I filled the frame with it with this macro lens, I would say about three inches away. Everybody asked me how did I get this, you know what did I do to get the frog to sit up like that? This is what the frogs actually do in defense, they just tuck their legs under and what I was actually trying to do I had just gotten this macro lens, I was experimenting with it, because I had a jewelry shoot that I needed to do so I was trying to get his eye and I was trying to blow it up really really big but he would not sit still. He kept tucking his head under so I took him and just propped him up on a battery, then I got real close to him and usually when I am experimenting with equipment and I have talked to other photographers about this if you are experimenting with equipment sometimes you get stuff that you didn't know you would get because you are using something that is new to you so you get a little bit of creative burst in your motivation there so you can get some various different things that you haven't gotten before and this image actually is hanging on my wall. It's one of my favorite ones and it's the first one that I ever took with that lens and everybody that comes into my studio says oh that's cool, did you do that? Is that real? Is that a real frog and it is. I was actually walking down the sidewalk one day with a friend and I saw the frog and I came back to the studio, brought it back with me and just started taking some pictures to try that lens out and it came out great so you can use macro lenses to photograph a variety of things. Jewelry is the main purpose I got it because I like to do commercial photography so I photograph jewelry from time to time. I was doing some stuff for Reid's Jewelers shooting diamond rings and you can check some stuff out on my website tomsapp.com and just click on commercial and you can see some various different diamond rings I have photographed and other jewelry products or just products in general. So but nowadays using a macro lens is simply a matter of putting it on you know and then you want to max it out usually you want to get, if you want to blow it up that is what I do is called maxing it out where you get as close to the subject as you can almost you want to go over so the subject is blurry basically and that's when you are using a fixed lens. So you zoom out or just get the focus so that it is all the way out and then you would actually in here we can actually do that here we'll switch it to manual, manual and then we're going to zoom out so get the extension on the lens so it goes out as far as it can and then what you're going to want to do is get so close that it is blurry and then back up a little bit to where the subject is in focus and that's the max that you can actually blow that subject up with that lens. Now when you're doing macro stuff a lot of the lenses are defraction limited and what that means is when the light goes in it can cause a haze or a softness to the quality of the image so you want to watch that. If that does happen you simply go down in your aperture or harden the light so the light source isn't so soft and that will get rid of that. This is Tom Sapp, how to use a macro lens. Have a great day. Thank you."