Macro Photography: springtime nature photography page 2, taking and enhancing the images

Taking the pictures

You might think autofocus would be the quickest option, but for this sort of work manual focus is much faster and eliminates any chance of the AF ‘hunting’. Set the lens to its mimimum distance, or whatever distance gives you a composition you’re happy with. When you see a bee (or other flying insect) land on a flower, move right in close, looking through the viewfinder until the subject snaps into focus. You may need to quickly fine tune the focus before shooting, but don’t take too long! You may not get it right first time, but do persevere.

Photoshop Enhancements

Once you’ve managed to capture a shot or two, you’ll probably want to tidy them up a bit on the PC. Depending on how good your technique was at the shooting stage, you may need to crop any unwanted edges out so that, for example, the flower completely fills the frame, and you’ll almost certainly need to apply some levels, colour correction and perhaps a small increase in saturation – though as usual with these things, less is  more. In fact this image is full frame and needed no cropping at all, but that’s what comes with practice!

Apply Sharpening

While no amount of software-based sharpening can compensate for an image not being focused correctly, most images benefit from a degree of sharpening before printing. The obvious way to do this is to select the Sharpen filter from the Filters menu, but these are crude and offer little control over the effect. Instead, select Unsharp Mask (from the same menu). Adjust the Amount slider but don’t go mad – somewhere between 50 and 100 is usually enough. If printing, set the Radius to 2.0 and the Threshhold to 1.0 or zero. Use the preview pane to check the result.