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.