![]() ![]() More light also means the camera can use a faster shutter speed, reducing the chance of motion blur in the final image.ĭon’t forget about composition, either. It’s often easy to forget how much lower the light level is in the shade – because our eyes are smarter than our photographer brains sometimes – and any step above base ISO your camera has to make is going to start mushing up those fine macro-style details. Getting a great-looking macro image is much easier when shooting in broad sunlight than under tree cover. It can often seem as if the wind actually waits for you to pull out your camera. One tip is to try holding the plant or tree branches, for example, with your hand just out of shot.Īs with just about every form of photography, light is your friend. Shooting at this scale, slight motion in your subject is amplified and will often lead to blurred results. Wind is your enemy with macro nature photography. There are some practicalities to bear in mind, things we’ve learned from years of testing macro cameras in phones. These third-party apps can typically be used with the main camera and the selfie camera, but not secondary ones like ultra-wides and zooms - so not much use if your zoom or ultra-wide lens takes the best close-up pictures. You may bump into the same issue as us, though. However, some third-party apps do have it, such as Manual Camera DSLR for Androids and ProCamera for iOS. It looks ugly on the preview window, but takes the guesswork out of focusing. It’s called focus peaking and it's where the sharpest part of the picture is outlined. Phone camera apps don’t have the tool often used on dedicated cameras to make sure the part you want is sharp, though. We recommend moving slightly - closer and further away – and capturing multiple stills of each scene, so you have a choice of which part of the subject is highlighted best when you come to review the images. You need to take careful notice of which parts on the preview appear the sharpest. Most cheap smartphones don't feature a macro camera (Image credit: Realme, Motorola, Xiaomi) The tricky part with ultra-wide camera macro photography is that the depth of field is likely to be wafer-thin, meaning only a small area of your subject will appear sharp. What we tend to do is to experiment with all the lenses a camera has, including digital zoom ones, and see which images come out the best. This should let you manually alter the lens’s focus, taking temperamental autofocus out of the equation. If your phone has a 'Pro' mode, try using that. In most cases an ultra-wide camera will be able to focus significantly closer than the primary - this is why lots of top-end phones actually use their ultra-wides to take macro images rather than having a separate lens.Īctually getting the camera to focus super-close can be tricky, though. How close you are able to focus on the subject is the key part here. How to get the best results from non-macro phonesĭon’t have a phone with a solid dedicated macro camera? The good news is there’s no magic to a macro lens that means you can’t try out this style of photography with other cameras. We find these phones can often take better close-up images with their primary cameras, so carry on reading to find out how to improve your results. If your macro camera has a 2MP sensor, it won’t take good images. Some of the worst offenders in this area are Motorola and Oppo. In the past couple of years, several of the most popular phone manufacturers have taken to including low-quality macro cameras in their phones in order to bulk up the numbers - the premise being that a three or four-camera phone is going to sell better than a two-camera one. However, you shouldn’t just use the dedicated macro mode and assume it’s the best your phone can do. Or the general settings menu, which typically sits on the left side of the camera app.Īll phone makers use their own cameras apps, which is why we can’t be entirely specific about this part. ![]() This may be part of the mode selection screen, usually accessed to the right of the shutter button. If you don't see it there you should find a macro mode in a settings menu. ![]() The macro one is typically identified by a flower symbol because that’s one of the classic subjects for macro photography. ![]() There may be a line of controls next to the shutter button that switches between the lenses. You typically access them in one of two ways. Many Android handsets have dedicated macro cameras. We’ll cover some crucial tips for this later on. Other iPhones don’t have a dedicated macro mode but you can still take good macro shots with them. Apple has also added a way to turn this auto-switch feature on and off in the camera's Settings menu. The iPhone 13 Pro's macro lens (Image credit: Apple)Īs is so often the case, Apple makes things easy. ![]()
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