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Close-up .. Special techniques .. How to take the most beautiful pictures .. Photography book

Special techniques
Close-up

When you take a close-up picture, you walk your subject carefully, showing details that the eye sometimes does not notice or are even invisible. In a portrait, for example, you can emphasize a section of the face by photographing it from close up and calibrating the machine on this surface.

Note that the phrase (close-up) includes a larger-than-life image separated from its surroundings and containing many details, but it does not necessarily require the use of special equipment. If you take a picture from a natural distance and then enlarge a section of the draft in the lab, you will show some details that would have passed without being noticed, but the image will definitely lack the analysis and general clarity that we can obtain from point photos using a special lens, rings or a close-up photography bellows.

A close-up image is an image that is approximately the same size and height as the subject. The term “photomacrography” refers to an image that is larger than the dimensions of the main subject. Photomicrography is done using a microscope. Magnifying an image requires the use of either a special lens or a zoom bellows. A macro lens has been invented to give a detailed image of very close subjects and its calibre at infinity can be less than that of a normal lens. Its maximum aperture is often less wide. A normal lens equipped with one or more zoom rings will give a magnified image without losing much of its quality, but you must work very close to your subject. It is even worse if you use a wide-angle lens because the enormous magnification you will get will give you a very poor image. For most close-up views it is preferable to use a lens with a medium long focal length (90) mm for a 24 x 36 machine with extension rings: we can work with it at a reasonable distance from the subject and get a magnified image without any noticeable loss of quality.

There are two points to take into account when working close-up: on the one hand, the need to increase the exposure and on the other hand, the problems of loss. As for the first point, this increase in exposure can require a relatively long exposure time to show the relative distances, the design of which requires other calculations.

The short distance between the lens and the subject makes lighting difficult because we are exposed to the cutting of the light beam. A tripod and a flexible button will undoubtedly help you to give you this difficulty. A good solution is to direct the light by means of a perfectly directed reflector. It allows you to project a very narrow light beam over the small subject, for example a cylinder of white cardboard surrounding the directed light or even a hole in a black sheet: if you use a flash (and this is a good idea to prevent the image from moving) try not to cast strong shadows over the subject.

As we have seen, the 90mm lens of a 24x36 camera allows you to not only work at a reasonable distance from your subject but also gives good images: these two factors are especially important for portraiture because a lens with a short focal length will distort the model and make it look like a caricature. Here, on the contrary, we stay far enough away from the subject so as not to disturb it and thus obtain an undistorted image.

- Oblique lighting
The oblique light from the sky shows the protrusions of the wall and the structure of the butterfly. To compensate for the increased exposure time, the exposure must be nine times the normal exposure.
Lehnhoff lens, long-burner, thirteen-second exposure, aperture 16, Ford HP4

- Using a long exposure:
A large-format camera with three-draw to obtain a ratio of 1.5 water drops. The negative image was then enlarged when printed. To overcome the vibrations, two supports were used to stabilize the camera: the first support for the back section and the second support for the front section. An exposure of nine times the normal exposure plus one second to compensate for the exchange difference.
Linhoff Triple-tow 6 sec

Aperture 45 Ford FP4

- Delicate lighting
In macro photography, to avoid blocking part of the light that illuminates the subject, we move away from it. For better clarity, we use long focal lengths with extension rings. In this image, I used flash and reflector to capture the details of the skin.
Pentax Long-tow with zoom rings and electronic flash Aperture 16 Ford FP4