How to Shoot Creatures in the Macro World

David Guy Maynard takes on frogs and fast-flying insects with the new Tamron SP 90mm VC Macro lens.

Article by Jenn Gidman

Images by David Guy Maynard

David has his own terrarium ("I've had good luck with frogs!") and also shoots in the wild, but in both instances, he has figured out how to get some of his subjects to sit still in front of his camera. "You need a lot of luck and patience with insects, but I've learned how to hypnotize the frogs," he says. "With my own frogs, I just stick my hand in the terrarium and they'll come right onto me. With wild frogs and other herps and reptiles, I just do these methodical movements and they become sedate enough so that I can usually reach out and put their little hands where I want them. If not that, I can at least tap the branch behind them and they'll move just enough to where I want them to be."

David recently started shooting macro with the new Tamron SP 90mm VC Macro lens. Although he mainly uses manual focus for his macro work, David praises the 90mm VC's quick autofocusing ability. "I'm thoroughly impressed with the focusing speed on this lens," he says. "I'll use it, for instance, to track a bee flying fast from flower to flower. I'll put my camera on AI, lock my focus point, and just follow the bee. It focuses so fast that you're literally keeping up with the bee's movement and just snapping shots along the way. The sharpness is phenomenal."

The Vibration Compensation on the new 90mm is an especially appreciated addition. "It's one of the best things about this lens," David says. "When you're shooting macro, you're often fighting for a deeper depth-of-field, which means closing down the aperture. If you do that, you need to slow down your shutter speed, because you're letting less light in. In the past, I had to really flood my subjects with light for macros and close-ups, but with the VC on that 90mm, I can drag the shutter a lot more and slow it down, which gives me better depth-of-field."

Read on for David's tips for shooting creatures and plant life in the macro world.

Set your subjects against the right background.
When you're shooting really close-up macros, the depth-of-field tends to be shallow anyway, so you can just make a bokeh behind your subject pretty easily - as long as there's nothing extremely close behind it, the background is going to blur out intensely.

A lot of my macro shots also look like they were shot with a completely black background. They weren't: Those are completely natural backgrounds. If you pound flash onto your subject, the faster you jack up the shutter speed, the less ambient light behind the subject will be absorbed. It can look like night behind my subjects at 1 o'clock in the afternoon.

I also have a pop-out kit that has five reflectors in one unit. It has a diffuser panel, as well as a silver reflector and a gold reflector. If you tilt the cover up, you've also got a black side as an option. You can pop these up and lean them behind your subject. I've done this to great effect with the silver reflector. It's obviously not intended as a background, but if you hit your subject with light with that silver behind it, it breaks the subject out so it looks 3-D and chiseled against a beautiful, high-key background. You have to be a little cautious, because you can blow the image out, but as long as you have a handle on your exposure, you'll be OK.

Know where to focus.
If I'm shooting florals, I focus on the center portion of the flower, the part with the pollen crystals. With insects, frogs and other creatures, I always focus on the eyes - with one exception. One of my favorite things to do is to find a wild frog on a leaf, light it from above, and then shoot it from underneath so I get the frog's silhouette. In that case, I simply focus on the shape of the silhouette.

Create drama in your macro images.
A common mistake all photographers make (not just macro photographers - I see this with photographers shooting human portraits, too) is that they create static images. You want your shots to be dynamic. Let's say you want to get a head-and-shoulders shot of a frog, and he's looking out to your left. You want to give a little distance on that left side of him, so it almost appears he's looking out into the distance. If you crowd that side that he's looking out toward, it looks like he has nowhere to look. That makes a huge difference in the viewer's perception of that image and creates more drama in the shot.

Look for different angles.
If you shoot a frog or other herp from up above looking down on the creature, that's the angle that everyone shoots. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, because when you're walking along on the sidewalk and a frog or snake comes out from a bush, you're already looking down on that frog or snake. That's the angle we're used to. However, if you get to where you're looking up at your subject or where you're even with it, now you're not its superior - you're in your subject's world, which creates much more drama. It's a fresh perspective, and you actually participate in your subject's environment rather than document its environment.

To see more of David Guy Maynard's images, go to www.dmaynardphotography.com. For a quick macro how-to, check out this video with David on Tamron's YouTube channel.