My wife, my camera, a sunny afternoon and a walk through the neighborhood. That is often the simple recipe to shoot some nice macro-photos. We made a spontaneous trip through the fields in our neighborhood and I wanted to take some pictures of flowers and blossoms. I kept my gear as simple as possible because it was a very hot and muggy day. So, I took my Nikon with a macro lens (I prefer the Tamron 90mm Macro on my DXCamera) and we started.
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We found a nice meadow with lots of flowers so I started photographing. There were also a lot of insects out there and after a while they were much more interesting than just flowers. As always when shooting macro, I switched to manual focus (focusing with my body), set the camera to aperture-priority-mode (this makes it really simple to concentrate on focusing and composition).
It was very sunny that day, so I kept the aperture between f/5,6 and f/8 and started to crawl through the flowers. Although the insects were very busy -with some patience- it is possible to capture them in the position you want to. Of course you´ve got to take a lot of pictures but disk space does not cost that much, so who cares.
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I did not use any flashlight, on a sunny day it´s not necessary, and no tripod. I love the flexibility you get if you do not take your whole camera stuff with you and you can act as free as you wish. Of course, the picture quality could be better with more gear used, but how often did you set up your tripod-mounted-camera perfectly and you missed your target during that time.
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At the end of this little walk I had a lot of great insect-pictures and the flower pictures I wanted to shoot appeared boring to me. But that’s life and nevertheless I was very pleased with the results I got. It is a whole new world that you get aware of with a special type of beauty. And also really colorful.
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Jan Jentsch
I started photography with my first digital bridge camera 10 years ago but never took it serious. By upgrading to a nikon aps-c I bought for my work I decided to learn more about the technical background and the artistic varieties of photography. Since that time my main interests are landscape photography, macro photography or just exploring the world with my camera. Until now I ́m an autodidact, reading a lot hard copy and online magazines. But the most important thing is: Just go out and take pictures!