Close-up lenses enable you to photograph the tiniest details of a flower.
Besides family and friends, flowers in the garden or in the woods are among the most popular photographic subjects. Flowers may be photographed from a distance to gain the full scope of a garden or meadow full of wildflowers, but they are often better portrayed in high detail, filling the image frame. A variety of camera lenses are capable of taking detailed images of flowers, each having its own strengths and weaknesses.
Telephoto Lens
The telephoto lens is a long focal-point tool that magnifies distant objects. This lens length enables you to narrow the image down to the flowers you want to capture, cropping out the surrounding landscape. If you are close enough, keeping in mind the minimum focusing distance, the telephoto lens can narrow the image down to a single flower. Long lenses tend to have a more limited range of aperture settings, requiring longer exposure times. To capture the sharpest image possible, long lenses must be held perfectly still. A tripod is an important accessory for detailed images with a long lens.
Macro Lens
A macro lens has a short minimum focusing distance, measured down to a few inches. This feature enables you to fill the frame of your image with the minute details of the flower that you are photographing. This detail may be a small grouping of flowers or the stamen and pollen of a single blossom. Sharp images at this focal length also rely on a steady hand or a support such as a tripod.
Supplementary Lenses
Regular lenses, those below 100mm, generally have a minimum focus distance that is too long for good close-up photography. While the flowers that you photograph will be in sharp focus, the detail that you desire will be lost due to your distance from the subject. Supplementary lenses that screw onto the filter ring of a regular lens insert a magnifying lens into the image path. These diopters have the additional benefit of shortening the focusing distance, down to a few inches with the highest diopter strength. The sharpness of the image is degraded somewhat by diopters, with the highest-strength lens lowering quality the most.
Tubes and Bellows
Another accessory that serves to lengthen the focal length of the lens is an extension tube used with a regular lens. A tube fits between the mount of the lens and the camera body, and enables you to focus more closely and gain more detail in your floral images. A bellows is similar to a tube except that its length is variable, rather than fixed. Close-up images can be varied by adjusting the overall length of the bellows, moving the normal lens closer or further from the film plane.
Tags: focusing distance, detailed images, details flower, down inches, focal length, image down
