Tip of the month: March 2022. A commonsense solution to macro depth of field issues.

Macro is one of the most challenging fields of photography…

And a big part of the challenge is about depth of field – there isn’t any! Consider that with bird photography, you can zoom in on a bird, get the subject in focus and the background out of focus. But with macro, you can focus on the head of an ant and get the…rear end…out of focus. The closer you get, the harder it becomes to keep your photo sharp.

Serious macro photographers use artificial lighting and high-tech methods to try to increase the range of sharpness on their images. But there is a simpler way that is more about commonsense than fancy techniques.

Get the camera parallel to the subject.

If your subject is angled away from the camera, you can focus on one end and the other end will be out of focus. But if the subject is aligned parallel to the lens, then you can focus on almost any part of it and expect to get most of it sharp. Note that both the examples on this page are very big (in the macro world that is). To try and shoot them head-on, the best you could hope for is to focus on the head and sacrifice the rest. But from side-on, two quite large photos are sharp from end to end.