Photo Active

James Artaius shows you how to move away from bugs and flowers to explore more creative and fun avenues with your macro lens

Inspiration galore, including seven projects you can shoot indoors

When you buy a macro lens, your photography takes on a whole new perspective. It’s easy to think that macro is all about capturing close-up shots of insects or plants, but macro can be just as creative as any other genre of photography. By adding some miniature models, for example, you can turn a bowl of cereal into a macro swimming pool and produce some fun and inventive images.

You don’t need fancy lighting, but you will need good midday light if you’re using natural light. If you own a light tent or lightbox, your cereal bowl will fit perfectly inside and the shot will really benefit. You could also use a macro ring light if you have one, although this will produce very directional light, and might create shadows that you don’t want in your finished image. But I’m using a set of cheap continuous lights, bought for less than £20 on Amazon. I’m going to shoot onto a piece of white poster board, which I’ve set up on an ironing board to give myself a comfortable working height.

I’ve chosen an interesting-looking brand of cereal with fun shapes and bright colours for the shoot. I’m using yoghurt instead of milk; this stops the cereal going soggy and bleeding colour into the liquid, and also buoys the ‘swimming’ figures.

When you shoot, you can use a wide aperture of f/2.8 to isolate an individual figure, or stop down to f/16 or narrower to get the whole bowl in focus. And when you finish, you’ll have a hard-earned snack ready to eat!

f/16 1/80 sec