P#2 Q#4a: Macro Flower Photography Tips

Tony Sweet's macro flower photography tips

Tony Sweet: Basically, as your magnification gets greater and greater, in other words, as you get closer to your subject with a true macro lens, your depth of field at F22 could be as little as a half an inch. Or less, depending on how your magnification is.

So, what you want to be sharp is up to the photographer. If you want the edge of the petal to be sharp, or shoot inside, like way inside of the center and let the inside petals go soft. You are not going to get them all with one shot.

But you can get them all in focus using a specific software package that I'll mention later.

There's often no way to get the entire flower in focus without using special software. So even at F22, if your magnification is high, if you're only photographing the inside of the flower, you've got to pick what you want sharp.

If you are back a little way and showing some background, the F-stop that it would take to bring detail into the background is a function of how close you are to your subject.

But, more importantly, it depends on how close your background is behind your subject -- like in the distance. The further back your background is from the subject, the more you can stop down, which means go to F8, F11, F16. The background will be very soft. The closer it is to you, the more you need to open up if you want to show background. And then when you open up, you lose your depth of field in your flower.

That is a classic trade off in photography.

Audri Lanford: Right. So if you have a choice, you'd like to have your background further away from the subject, but you obviously can't always do that.

Tony Sweet: Yes, if I have my choice. You've got a set of priorities and then what you will settle with. And to me it's very simple: A soft background... a non-competitive background... is more important than anything.

So I'll select something in the flower that I want sharp, that has some sort of visual gravity, and I'll live with the rest. So for example, I'll make the edge of the petals sharp,.

But the background to me takes prominence over the subject. There's no question about that.

Audri Lanford: Another counter intuitive idea. I love it.

Our advice -- think about -- and make good decisions about -- what to keep sharp and what to blur to get the most out of macro flower photography.