When he was a kid, John Neel looked forward to the creatures that his biology teacher dad would bring home — even the tarantulas. “I would have loved to have had a macro lens when I was young,” he laughs. “I didn’t get into photography, however, until I was older.”

Today, Neel, who has a book coming out this summer (Rethinking Digital Photography: Making and Using Traditional & Contemporary Photo Tools), scours the local landscape in Pittsford, New York (a suburb of Rochester) with camera in hand, photographing anything interesting that catches his eye. Although his concentration over the years has mainly been fine-art photography, Neel recently discovered the joy of macro—and the exciting photographic possibilities available to him using the Tamron 60mm, 90mm, and 180mm lenses.

“Macro opens up new doors in terms of what can be photographed,” he explains. “With a macro lens, you’re suddenly down on your hands and knees, looking at things you’ve never looked at before. And you can find all of this right in your own backyard—stuff you might normally take for granted.”

Neel, who enjoys using his macro arsenal as telephoto lenses (especially in the wintertime), finds a nearly limitless catalog of photo-worthy subjects right outside his front door. “The great thing about the macro lenses is that, if I find something I want to move in real tight on, I can do so with these lenses,” he says. He especially relies on his 60mm lens for its compact size and fast 2.0 speed, which allows him to blur out his backgrounds for creative effect.

Although he prefers to shoot later in the day, Neel usually accepts whatever light he can find and works within those parameters. “You may see something you want to shoot — and you can’t change the lighting,” he says. “But you’re often attracted to something precisely because of the light that’s there. Just finding a bug on a blade of grass may not seem very compelling, but if the light is on that bug in just the right way, then it draws your attention. A photographer often has to be in the right place at the right time and hope that the subject offers the opportunity to shoot.”

The nature of macro photography allows you to get intimate with your subjects, but you also need to have a good dose of patience and the right equipment to ensure you capture what's in front of your camera. “When you’re doing macro, you get really involved with the subject, and you kind of lose track of time,” says Neel. “You become part of what’s going on, anticipating when an insect will land on something or when things will occur.”

This is where the 1:1 (lifesize) reproduction ratio of all three macro lenses allows Neel to afford his subjects — especially the living ones — an appropriate working distance. “I can be 7 or 8 inches away from the subject, not right on top of it, and get that 1:1 ratio, or somewhere around there,” he explains. “Working a slight distance from your subject and having that 1:1 magnification gives you the opportunity to photograph things that would otherwise be difficult to photograph.”

Shooting damselflies is one instance in which that comfortable working distance proves key. “The damselflies dance all over the place; then they land, but they’re only on whatever surface they’ve landed on for a short period of time,” he says. “I like that I can shoot at a distance instead of being right on top of the insects. I can get really nice shots without scaring them away.”

He also enjoys using his Tamron macro lenses for HDR work — which he tries to make look as realistic as possible. “Many HDR pictures out there don’t look very natural,” he says. “Instead of using HDR to its maximum, I don’t push the sliders all the way to one end. I think eventually we’ll see a single sensor that can handle the wider high dynamic range so we can capture it all in one shot; photographers are going to want that extra range.”

Neel used his 60mm lens to capture a damselfly during a brief hiatus in its swarming activity, then used HDR to compose the final image. “This is made up of three shots,” he explains. “It’s difficult to get these types of shots, because the bugs are always on the move. But because the 60mm is so fast, I can use the lens wide open with fast shutter speeds and knock off those three shots pretty quickly.”

You don’t even have to wait till warmer weather to take advantage of all that the macro world has to offer outdoors. Neel ventured out in the dead of winter near his home in Pittsford and came across a weathered old barn. Because of the snowbanks and other obstacles, he was only able to back up to a certain point with his 90mm. “From where I was, the front of the building was all I could see,” he says. “So this became an HDR image: I took a total of nine shots, using three bracketed exposures for each frame, for a total of 27 exposures.” Using fast shutter speeds and shooting manually allowed Neel to capture the entire sequence handheld.

In the end, exploring with macro photography can do more than simply add images to your albums or portfolio. “We tend to lose that whole idea of wonder we have in childhood as we get older,” says Neel. “We get bogged down with all of the other things we need to think about. Macro photography can transform your thinking about everything and bring back that wonder.”

To see more from John Neel visit http://www.pixiq.com/contributors/jneel