A bug’s life

Capture butterflies close-up as Qasim Syed gives advice on shooting macro photography

Wildlife and nature in and around London have been under my lens for about eight years. One of the best tips I can give is to diversify your subjects and have a toolbox of skills. Macro photography is very accessible: you can do it any time of the year, and you don’t need to go far. You don’t need the fanciest lenses or camera gear either.

Butterflies and odonata (such as dragonflies) over spring and summer, fungi over winter: these have given me opportunities to photograph nature all year round. The challenge with nature macro photography is that to get the best light or to get closest to your subject, you need to go during the golden hour, which is dusk or dawn.

The subjects can be hidden deep within undergrowth, and have distracting objects close and around them. This is where focus-stacking comes in. It is the technique of taking a series of image ‘slices’ at different

focal distances and ‘pancaking’ them together using software. This means you can shoot wide-open (more light, less noise), pick the sharpest aperture of your lens, and select which parts of the image are in or out of focus.

Cameras now often come with a focus-bracketing option – just click once and it will capture the images for you. Even better, some offer the ability to auto-stack these images into a JPEG within the camera. Instagram: @naturesyed