Wildlife UK Forum - Discuss the UK countryside and wildlife

i had another go at macro with the little nikon coolpix im quite impressed with it for what i payed for it its not a bad camera

A bit of practice and I think you will have it down!

Kingfisher

I am no expert but the big problem with macro is depth of field - i.e. trying to get all the parts of something small into focus.

Butterflies are good because their wings are quite thin and easy to focus on. Fat things like beetles and bees are more of a challenge. Good attempt but I would say take lots of shots and increase your distance - you can always crop the photo down later. (;

cheers for the advice i'll keep trying and fingers crossed i'll get there i hope

don't worry, I'll keep trying too!!

Not sure if you can with your camera, but if you can get the flash to fire it may help getting enough light on very close macro shots. The flash also freezes the movement, so reduces blur.

I think it's great you managed to get such a close shot of it. Macro is one of the hardest types I think, but so beautiful when it pays off.

The problem with flash is that you get that awful black background with flash alone, okay for nocturnal subjects, but looks so false for things like butterflies. If it's possible to use fill-in flash, then this can improve the appearence of the photo by giving some highlights.

Really, macro is not a form of photography that lends itself to "point and shoot" if it's to be done properly. Try setting the camera to Aperture Priority auto exposure and setting an f number that will give good depth of field, but not so much that the shutter speed is too slow, and see how that works, alternatively, set it to Shutter Priority and see how slow you can get and still get a pic with no camera shake, then use this and allow the camera to set the aperture. This latter technique will mean that depth of field will vary with the strength of light, but shallow dof is preferable to camera shake.

One way to minimise shake is to attach a length of string to the tripod socket, then when in position, tread on the string and pull the camera against it. This will reduce shake quite drastically.

It's all down to practice and experimentation, keep trying different techniques until you find one that suits you. At least with digital there is no waste and you can see immediately what you have managed to capture. I wasted many rolls of film discovering what worked best for me.

Richard, I agree there's a risk of black backgrounds with flash but it largely depends on how you compose the shot. If there's foliage in the near background it should be fine. This micro moth was taken using flash, as are almost all my macros. Both those shots were taken with a DSLR + macro lens etc, but in the past I've had reasonable results with point-and-shoots especially on the super-macro mode some of them have. Main difficulty is focusing through the screen. Now that I find tricky!