It’s a strange time. Spring is here and it’s starting to warm back up outside after the winter chill, but no matter where we are in the world, we’re still mostly stuck indoors. For photographers, this can be frustrating. We’ve spent the last few months just itching to get back outside, and now we can’t. What can we do? Joe Edelman has been thinking about this and over the past few days, he’s been doing a series of videos with photography challenges to try when stuck at home. Naturally, it’s a multi-part series, because we’re going to be here for a while. This one covers some pretty interesting creative macro tips for you to have a go at.
Macro is a fantastic topic to photograph because there are so many things we just don’t usually get to see all that close up. A lot of things that we see in our daily lives can look completely alien to us when viewed through a macro lens. Even more so when we start to play around with the lighting and intentionally put things a little out of context.
In the video, Joe uses a couple of Lumiee LED lights and a regular LED lightbulb to illuminate his subjects. Lumiee is a small light, but when it’s really close to your subject (and with macro you can get really close without it being in the shot) it can give you some great creative options. They’re small, so you can fit them just about anywhere, they’re RGB, letting you shoot just about any colour you want, and they’re super lightweight, so you don’t need to mess around with big heavy light stands and softboxes. Joe also uses a laptop screen behind his subject to help enhance the colour further, having it display images to produce some unusual backgrounds, out of focus. Being able to get the Lumiee LED close to the colour of the image on the screen, or complementing it or even contrasting with it, can produce some very interesting results. Joe walks us through his thought process while shooting, and goes over the post-processing, too, so you can see how he reaches his final results. Keep an eye on Joe’s channel, as he’ll be doing more videos in the “Stuck at Home Photography challenge” series. What have you been shooting at home to keep yourself sane?
