Macro Photography - The Fine Art Department of Photography

I've heard many photographers over the years say that they love fine art photography, yet never really try their hand at macro photography. There really is very little use for macro photography except for a purely artistic purpose. Landscape photography in it's finest forms is art, portraiture is art, but they all have more than one purpose: they can either be a family memory of a vacation, a snapshot in time of a person, or fine art.


But macro photography exists for the simple purpose of elevating the mundane to something more.  Whether you are looking at a daisy, a mushroom or a coffee bean, taking it to the extreme close up shows all the detail that you don't normally see. It's an opportunity to look at things  from a bug's-eye perspective, a fun usage of time...

To try your hand at it, you'll have to take your camera out of automatic, you'll like the results better. Try this for a project: go out in bright sunlight and find a flower or something else interesting. Set your ISO to 100, because the lower the ISO the clearer the image in terms of grain, set the shutter to somewhere around 1/800 and the f-stop to f-5.

Focus on the center part of the item you are photographing, because that will be the part most in focus, allowing the outer edges to feather out of focus a little. Play with the settings, and see what comes out of it.

Photography is about connecting..

Portrait photography is about making connections. The saying that it's not what you know but who you know applies here, but not in the standard way. In this case, it is more about how to connect with your subject in a way that makes them feel welcomed, respected and appreciated. After all, they are spending their hard-earned cash in your studio!

This becomes a challenge sometimes though, as most of us are used to looking at ourselves in the mirror. This is exactly the opposite of what we see in our own photograph. So the perspective is immediately off, and we feel uncomfortable looking at the photos.

The photographer's duty is to put you at ease, yes, I've said it before. But really, it is, and your job is to tell the photographer what you don't like about yourself, and what you do. When was the best picture ever taken of you? Why did you like it? If you can communicate at least some of these things to your photographer, you'll end up with a great portrait. You may not like that you've gotten older, or fatter, or thinner or whatever, but you will appreciate that the best portrait of you is still pretty darn good.

At the end of the day, isn't that the point?

Real Estate Photos

I'll admit it - I love cruising through real estate listings, even though we're not in the market. I like looking at the pictures. I'm a simple person, but I have to be honest -some of the photos I have seen posted with the home listings are horrible!

They look like something my twins could have taken in the dark.

To be fair, I am fairly certain that in most cases, they were quick shots to have something for prospective customers to look at in the listing, but I have to ask if the thought ever occurred to have a photographer swing by and take a few shots with a more critical eye. I cannot possibly be the only simple person out there who really likes looking at pictures! I may be more obsessed with pictures than the average person, but I know lots of people who love pictures, and say that they are more inclined to purchase or think about purchasing something where the pictures look good.

I do not think that real estate is much different.

Just for the sake of example, I took a few pictures of a house that is on the market, some good, some bad - deliberately - to illustrate the point.

The left one is obviously under exposed, and doesn't do much to help the viewer see how big and beautiful the yard really is. The picture on the right shows the nice pool, but adds the details of the stairway leading to the back half of the yard, shows the shed that is in nice shape(at least from a distance), and the retaining wall detail.

The one on the right acts as a teaser, and shows that the yard is more than just a pool with a deck, and does it in one shot instead of three - giving the viewer context as well. The one on the left says that it has a pool and that whoever took the picture needed glasses to see that it sucked.

If you saw these pictures in different listings, which would you be more inclined to look at?

Family Portraits: Nightmare or Treasured Memory?

I'm sitting here getting my stuff together for a full day of photographing families, and it occurred to me that most people don't really know how to prepare for family portraits - which makes for tense, worried parents and out of control kids.

Clients worry about what kind of clothes to wear, how to do their hair, etc. But I cannot say this often enough to my clients: relax! How you feel on the inside is often how you look in your portraits. If you are tense and stressed because you are worried about how you'll look, then it will show in the final product. Clothes and hair are only part of the equation.

It is my job as the photographer to worry about eye direction, whether or not Johnny is smiling, and keeping everyone in position. The biggest thing you as a parent can do to make my job easier, and by extension your portraits better, is to make it clear to yourself and your kids that the process will go much more quickly and less painfully if you just trust me and follow directions.

I am not saying that I do not want to hear your ideas, opinions or thoughts on what you want out of your portraits, or that I am infallible, because I am not. I do want to hear your ideas, and make your portrait session everything you hope for. But as a Mom, and a photographer, my experience has been that our kids respond to situations how they are taught, and right, wrong or indifferent, they are taught by us every time we interact with them.

Not to be a whiner here, but we get tired of being the target of blame for bad portraits, when our clients walked through our door in a bad mood because of the fight to get out of the house in one piece!

The best way we as photographers can put you at ease is to make you feel welcomed into our studio. The best way for you as clients to make your portraits treasured memories is to lead by example!

Like Mother Like Sons?

You would think that our twins would get sick of taking pictures, with all of the studio shots I have done of them. They are my advertising boys, on my business card and are the sometimes unfortunate guinea pigs of my experiments whenever I have a new idea.

I realized today while going through the pictures on their little Fisher Price cameras, that not only are they not sick to death of pictures, but they are learning to create images themselves. They pose their action figures, themselves and ME to make their pictures look the way they want.

You're never too young, I guess, to find something you love doing!

Which brings me to my point: our five-year-old twins are arranging items and people to create the images they want, the way they want. Any photography teacher will tell you that a good image is made, not randomly captured. Whether you are taking pictures of your kids playing outside, or arranging a few flowers to look just-so, paying attention to the little things around your subject will pay off in dividends for great shots.

Just a thought for the day...

The Basics...

Photography, as anyone who can do a google search can tell you, literally means to "draw with light". If you understand this, and start to look at your subject with that in mind, you begin to understand why some photographs are stunning, and others are just okay.

There are more advanced concepts like Rembrandt lighting, etc, but the basic idea is to look at your subject for the light, and more importantly, the shadow. A shadow is what gives shape to an image.

Case in point: draw a vase and color it in, but only use one color and the same amount of pressure throughout the drawing. What does it look like? I'd put my money on it looking rather flat.

Now do the same thing, only before you start to draw, in your mind's eye, imagine how it would look if you had the sun shining through a window, falling on the same vase. Can you see the shadows, the way they bend around the shape of the vase?

As a photographer, I do a similar exercise before I set up for a shoot. I think about how the ambient lighting is going to fall on a subject, and then manipulate it in order to give it the definition and shape that I want. Sometimes I use a reflector, others I use studio lights, and other times I use a combination of them.

Depending on the type of shadows I am going for, I may use a harder light, or a softer light. I tend to prefer softer shadows because the overall feel isn't quite as startling, but a sharper shadow edge can really make a spectacular image.

Play with it!