What I Had to Learn About Close-Ups

I began in the business as a landscape photographer, shooting mostly for stock. The rules were fairly simple: I almost always set my aperture at f/22 for maximum depth of field and the greatest detail and sharpness throughout the image. Precise camera placement was not critical in landscape work. But when I added close-up photography to my repertoire, I quickly found out that I had a lot to learn.

Here are some of the things I had to understand in order to make a successful journey along the close-up learning curve.

• Depth of field is different in close-up land. As magnification increases, depth of field decreases, so the closer I got to my subject, the less depth of field I had, even at f/22. The answer was selective focus: focusing on a specific part of a subject at a wide aperture (like f/2.8 or f/4). The rest of the subject will go soft, and the viewer's eye will be drawn to the sharpest point.

• I could maximize sharpness by positioning the lens on the same plane as my subject. It took me a while to realize that if my subject was flat or largely flat-in effect, two-dimensional—and if it were highly magnified, even f/22 might not be enough to bring in all the razor-sharp detail (backlit leaves and low-profile flowers are good examples). I began to look at the front of the lens as I set up my shots to be sure it was parallel to the plane of the subject. Then I'd press the depth-of-field preview button to be sure that everything I wanted in focus was in focus.

• I needed to fill the frame. Errors in composition are apparent in any image, but in close-ups they seem a bit more glaring because of the highly concentrated nature of close-up photography. When you're determined to get a small area of the image sharply focused and well positioned, you may forget to check the edges of the frame, and empty space at the corners or edges can be very distracting. Paying close attention to edges and corners dramatically improved the visual impact of my close-ups.

• Soft, colorful backgrounds are often vital. I realized this when I saw a John Shaw image of a dragonfly against a seamless, soft green background. An effective technique, it's a function first of the distance from the front of the lens to the subject, then the distance from the subject to the background color. Basically, you need your camera to be closer to your subject than the subject is to the background while shooting wide open with a long (say, 200mm or 300mm) or micro lens. It seemed a bit counterintuitive to use a long lens for a close-up shot, but I found that longer lenses are the domain of soft balls of color and seamless, colorful backgrounds.

• The front of the flower—or any subject—is not always the story. It's easy to get into the habit of shooting only from the front because we think that the front is obviously the most attractive part. That's not always the case. Thinking outside the box to shoot the backs of flowers added variety and a number of dramatic images to my close-up flower photography.

Those five fundamental lessons—and a lot of practice—formed the foundations of my close-up photography techniques.

Visit Tony's website, www.tonysweet.com, to view a collection of his images, learn about upcoming workshops and keep up with his Visual Artistry blog.