Digital media designer and, for at least the last two years, photographer Bettina Güber recently shot a series of photographs that are stunning in their simplicity. Not overdone or over-processed, they're simply photos of flowers and leaves from her backyard, covered in rain drops from the storm that recently passed through.
Here is a photograph of a Sydney funnel-web spider, Atrax robustus.
I won’t explain the biology of this delightful animal here – you may read about it at Wikipedia in greater arachnological detail. Instead, I want to show the process by which I arrived at this composition. Most photographs involve some combination of creativity and constraint, and this one was no different.
There is beauty in imperfection. In fact, imperfection might be considered the subject within a subject that photomicrographer Danny Sanchez tirelessly seeks out to create his stunning photography.
Sanchez's main subjects are gemstones, but the colorful, alien 'landscapes' he captures are made up of imperfections called 'inclusions' that actually make a gem less valuable. You might say that one gem merchant's trash is a gem photographer's treasure.
Landscape photographer Tim Cooper is a name we just recently shared with you. Today, we’re sharing his work with you again, this time in the form of a presentation he shared at a B&H event earlier this year. In it, he gives a detailed look at the world of macro photography.
When it comes to macro photography, knowing how to properly focus stack your images can make a massive difference. To that end, the walkthrough above and Photoshop tutorial below offer a fantastic explanation of what focus stacking is, why and when you should be using it, and how to do it using software most of us already have installed and ready to go.
The thing about nature is that, if you look close enough at just about anything, you're bound to find a beauty and symmetry that defies description. In the case of Linden Gledhill's microscope photos of butterfly wings, he simply discovered another level of beauty in something that already captures many of our imaginations.
When you hear the term flower photography, it probably doesn't inspire a particularly powerful reaction. There are plenty of gorgeous images of flowers -- from wildflower fields to beautifully-lit bouquets -- and so the genre isn't somewhere we usually look for inspiration.
That is, until we ran across photographer Mo Devlin's stunning shots of frozen flowers.
Macro photographs of insects are nothing new; and yet, Malaysian Jimmy Kong's photographs of spiders staring straight at the camera are immediately captivating and at least a tiny bit terrifying.
If you've followed PetaPixel for a little while, you'll already know that a laser pointer's focus lens can be put to good DIY use helping you take macro photos with your smartphone.
And even though you can simply find a way to secure the lens against your phone, a new Instructable shows you how to build a microscope stand/macro photography rig that will eliminate that particular problem altogether... and for only $10!
Once in a while we stumble across a great archive of public domain or creative commons imagery that just blows us away. Sometimes it's historical photos, other times beautiful photos from space, but this time around it's neither.
Thanks to the US Geological Survey's Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr, we now have access to over 1,200 gorgeous macro photos of bees and other insects.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in the case of Suren Manvelyan's macro photography, it's just in the eye. After his extreme close-up photos of both human and animal eyes went viral one right after the other, Manvelyan decided to continue seeking out more beauty in the eyes of animals by releasing a part two to the amazing series we shared with you back in 2011.
Capturing the growth or bloom of a flower is a staple of time-lapse photography, and therefore, it can be a bit banal. But photographer Daniel Csobot has managed to put a macro flower time-lapse together that is both beautiful and captivating.
Texas-based tabletop photographer JD Hancock is a self-proclaimed nerd. But he's a nerd with a bent towards photography, and so the myriad action figures and toys he owns don't just sit unattended in their mint-condition boxes, they get to act out funny real-life scenarios through the lens of his camera.
Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking -- combining several images taken at different depths of field -- he's generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.
Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein is a 26-year-old photographer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He works as an advertising photographer and creative retoucher, but one of his personal passions is shooting highly detailed macro photographs of tiny insects. While all of his macro photographs are amazing to look all, there's a particular subset that caught our eye: Reinshtein managed to capture a number of insects with water drops sitting on their top of their heads.
Russian photographer Stanislav Aristov's matches series has been getting some well-deserved attention lately. To create these sculptures, he bends and molds the matches while they're burning. He then photographs them, as well as the flames and smoke, using a macro lens and studio flash.
If you have an old plastic kit lenses lying around, something that you are not using for anything serious, you can give it a new life as a macro lens by removing the front element.
If you just so happen to have both a C-mount CCTV lens and a M42-mount teleconverter lying around, try combining the two: you may find a makeshift macro combo on your hands.
Bob Ross became a household name a couple of decades ago through his show The Joy of Painting on PBS. His friendly personality, soothing voice, and artistic talent got countless people hooked on oil painting, beating the devil out of paintbrushes, and creating happy little trees and clouds. He's the kind of guy who could (and did) talk about watching paint dry and make it enjoyable.
Thomas Shahan is the closest thing we've found so far to a photographic Bob Ross. In the video above, he introduces us to the art of high-magnification macro photography, which he employs to create vibrant images of all kinds of tiny critters.
Photography enthusiast Kris Robinson used to handhold a flash above his subjects for …
You don't need to shell out money for a nicer camera or a special lens to play around with macro photography. In addition to freelensing and using your lens backward, you can also place an ordinary magnifying glass in front of your lens to enlarge the world. Graphic designer Clif Dickens shot these close-up photos using a magnifying glass and an iPhone 3GS.