Requirement 1: I recently took two close-up photos, both focusing on subjects in the foreground. Since I don’t have a macro lens, I bought some extension tubes to use with the lenses I already own. The first photo is of my basil plant that has flowered, and I was able to capture the small details of the flowers really well. The second photo is of the leaves from my gourds, and I focused on their patterns and texture. Using the extension tubes helped me get a shallow depth of field, so the background is nicely blurred and the details in the foreground stand out more. I used an 11mm extension tube for the next six photos.
Requirement 2: The next set of photos focuses more on the mid-ground. With my camera, I can manually adjust where I want the lens to focus. In the first photo, I focused on the birdhouse gourd in the middle, making sure the rest of the image is blurred for contrast. In the second photo, I used the long bean plants as a natural frame around the zinnias in the background, making them the focal point of the shot.
Requirement 3: For these two photos, I captured a butterfly first with its wings open and then with them closed. Since I’m using extension tubes, the area of focus is smaller, which made it a bit tricky to get the whole butterfly in sharp focus. It was a bit of a challenge, but I still managed to highlight the details of the wings, even though parts of the butterfly are slightly out of focus due to the shallow depth of field.
Requirement 4: For these three photos, I focused on plants—well, mostly plants. The first two pictures are of a philodendron gloriosum, where I tried to capture the texture of its leaves. The third photo is of a bottle of aloe vera gel (technically not a plant, but derived from one!). I used a 16 mm extension tube for all of these shots, which allowed me to get closer and highlight the fine details, like the veins in the philodendron leaves.
Requirement 5: For the final requirement, I photographed man-made items, specifically some woodworking projects by my boyfriend, who’s really into the craft. The first photo shows part of a carpenter’s square that he made, using wood from a walnut tree. The second photo is of a handle he carved for one of his chisels. The last two photos feature his great-grandfather’s copper cup, where I focused on capturing the texture of the patina and the forge marks. I used a 16 mm extension tube for all of these shots, which really helped highlight the fine details in the materials. I will also mention that because macro photography uses a very shallow depth of field, I had to either shoot my photos in broad daylight or use a key light to capture these photos clearly.
Labels: Rachael_Nokham
