Nature Photography How To

Macro season is in full swing, with colorful flowers, interesting insects, and other creepy-crawlies just about everywhere you look, so if you still haven’t dusted off your trusty close-up lens, now is the time.

The nice thing about macro photography in spring and summer is that you don’t have to travel further than your own backyard to discover a wide-variety of appropriate subjects. The tutorial below from a British expert has a bunch of great tips for capturing the best images possible.

Instructor Andrew Lanxon is a world traveler, shooting beautiful photos of landscapes and macro imagery. This behind-the-scenes episode is all about the latter, with a discussion of camera settings, composition, helpful accessories, and other straightforward techniques that will make your images really stand out.

While exploring a lush woodland area near Edinburg’s busy coast, Lanxon provides several creative ideas for giving macro shots an artistic flair. He also demonstrates how he uses focus stacking during the editing process for really sharp results.

Many outdoor photographers prefer shooting with natural light, and sometimes that is all you need. But, depending upon conditions, a bit of supplemental illumination will make a big difference in your results. With that in mind, Lanxon demonstrates how he uses LED and flash lighting to make eye-popping photos.

Lanxon concentrates on mushrooms and a few blossoms during this excursion, but everything you’ll learn is appropriate for capturing other macro subjects—especially during this time of year when the landscape is bursting with life. As you’ll see, he prefers using a small tabletop tripod, not a full-sized model, for two basic reasons.

As he explains, tabletop tripods are compact and lightweight, making them effortless to carry on a long day in the field. Secondly, these small camera supports can be placed atop a tree stump, flat rock, or even on the ground for convenient low-angle shooting.

Lanxon discusses the focal length he prefers, and why backing off from maximum magnification can result in a more pleasing composition. He also demonstrates how to make subjects stand out by blurring the background with an appropriate aperture setting.

After watching Lanxon’s spring excursion, take a quick trip of your own to his instructional YouTube channel for more outdoor photography tips and tricks. We also recommend you check out the tutorial we posted from another accomplished pro, explaining how to use the Sunny 16 Rule to capture properly exposed images without a camera’s light meter.