My First Macro

What's This?

Butterfly

Water on The Flower

Advis by  Bart Declercq to Foto "Water on The Flower:

Is this the full image scaled down, or a cut out of a small part of the image? I'm guessing the second option, since I doubt that camera-lens combination allows you to get this close in full-image.

Technical remarks

Perhaps an extension tube between camera and lens will allow you to get closer to the subject, so it fills more of the camera's image, but I don't know if good extension tubes exist for the NX3 camera.

How are your in-camera settings, this camera allows three "quality" settings, RAW, JPEG(fine) and JPEG(standard) - I would strongly advise using RAW and then converting the image to something else on the computer, if you do want to use JPEG, use (fine) - this image does give the impression of having some compression artefacts, which can happen at lower JPEG quailities.

I'm guessing that this picture was taken in overcast sky, which would explain the lack of shadows and the very long exposure time even at F/3.2 and ISO200 - these kind of conditions really ask for using a flash, preferably not the built in flash (or if you use the built in flash, try to diffuse the light it makes with a white sheet) - better, if possible, to wait for better light conditions, early morning or late evening light is usually best, you can also use white sheets to diffuse the sunlight a bit.

You might also be able to increase the ISO to 400 or 800, but I doubt that higher than that will leave acceptable image quality.

The flowers also lack depth-sharpness, due to using the very open F-ratio (F/3.2 lets in a lot of light, but in this case only a few flowers are sharp - probably F/5.6 or even F/8 would be better, but then you'll really need more light or our exposure time increases too much. (You can always try using a tripod to stabilise the camera and use longer exposures).

So, on the technical side, in short:

- Use the highest image quality the camera can be set to

- Use extension tubes to get to real "macro", rather than cutting out a small piece of the photo.

- More/better light will be essential, unless you can stabilise camera and subject for longer exposure times.

- Stop down that aperture for increased Depth-of-Field

Style remarks

For an image to be "interesting", it needs to show the subject in an interesting way - flowers filling the whole screen like this is not "interesting" for anything except technical documentation.

Perhaps try to shot them from a different angle (this image looks straight into the flowers).

You need to have the eye fall into the picture, there are several techniques to do this:

- Rule of thirds: an image is often more interesting if the attention point is somewhere along a "thirds" line, imagine dividing the image into three equal pieces, either horizontally or vertically. Put the object of attention on that "thirds line" rather than in the middle of the picture. That tends to give a more dynamic, "interesting" feel.

If a subject is too big or has a shape that does not allow 'thirds' placement, you can try orienting it along a diagonal line, going from one corner to the other.

Another styling issue here is the background - because the flowers are rather "flat" and not perfectly sharp, there is no clear distinction between them and the leaves and berry in the background, making the image look too busy.

Problem here is that to fix that, you would need to "blur" the background - in the technical section I suggest closing the aperture, but that will do the opposite, it will "unblur" the background.

The best solution would be to isolate the flowers, perhaps shot them from an angle where the background is much farther away, you can even try to "force" this by bending the branch the flowers are on.

Alternatively, though I would only suggest this if other solutions don't work - use photo-editing software to select the background and blur it more, without touching the foreground. This kind of selective blurring might be considered "cheating" by some, but if it's done in a subtle fashion, I don't think it is any different from other actions that photographers often take, such as increasing contrast or rebalancing colours in post-processing. Don't go overboard with such manipulation, though, or your image will start looking like a bad painting. (On Google+)