Today, I had an article published on the front page called
Rube Goldberg, Macro Photography, and You: Close-ups on a Budget It took a long time to prepare and write...and it's full of technical junk, is really long, and might be a little inaccessible - or at least difficult to get through. Also, some of the techniques are somewhat involved (and annoying to shoot).
In this thread, I wanted to show how silly-simple shooting closeups can be with just one $5.00 item and any old DSLR. No technical jargon, no messing around with equipment, no post-processing/photoshop. Just point-and-stinkin'-shoot. No f-stops, no exposure meters, no manual junk of any kind.
I selected my oldest DSLR (Pentax KD100 from 2006...~$75.00 with lens on eBay these days), attached the 18-55mm kit lens, and screwed on a +4 magnifying filter that was part of a $10.00 set of four filters from Amazon.
I set
everything on the camera to auto (not even "macro mode") and wandered outside for 30 mins of shooting following only two rules:
1. Hold the camera still. Really still.
2. Make sure it's focused.
The only processing I did on this pile of photos was to auto-crop them in the middle of the shot (and at 36mb total for
all of the cropped photos below, that's less memory than four shots from my regular camera). It looks like it shot pretty dark today and most of the shots below could benefit from processing. But I didn't want to add that step to the demonstration.
Point-and-stinkin' Shoot. Here is what I came up with (30 mins shooting, 10 mins selecting photos, 10 mins writing this sparse prose). Viola! If I can, anyone can. Try it! And post your results here. It's simple-easy and really inexpensive to come up with decent closeups.
