2020 is fast becoming the year of not going out – staying indoors and generally staying away from crowded places. If you shoot landscape photography, that's not necessarily a problem as you can go very much be on your own. If, however, you fancy trying something a bit different, then here's a macro project for you to try from the confines of home.

Gardens provide an excellent resource to get out and take some photos, assuming you have some outdoors space of your own. Of course, the weather doesn't always lend itself to outdoors macro shooting either. Calm, sunny days are few and far between. And you need very still conditions for macro outdoors.

So it's an ideal time to go and select few subjects from ouside, bring them in and practise your home studio shooting skills.

Available light

For this particular set-up, youneed to make use of a naturaI source. f you have a conservatory then that is a perfect location; otherwise a table placed near a big window will also work well.

Basic set-up

I tend to use a plain white background which is fixed onto a background stand. The curve in it makes it an infinity background, meaning it will 'disappear' when shooting. The background roll I use is a plastic type sheet which is really shiny on one side and matte finish on the other. It measures 60cm x 135cm – large enough for most small products and macro work. It's fully waterproof and wipe clean, and only cost me about £13. A stand to hold it is about £18. Both are available from online retailers.

However, any large white background could be used so sheets of paper or the back of leftover wall paper, even a bed sheet if uncreased, plus pegs and some imagination!

The subject, a small chinese anenome flower, was taken from my garden and placed in an appropriate holder – I used an old vintage ink pot found in the garden! A blob of blue tack was used to hold the stem in place.

Face your subject towards the light source as much as possible.

The main reason for using a tripod is that it allows you to shoot at a lower ISO and maximise quality. Use the camera's 2-second self-timer to trigger the shot (or use a remote if you have one) as pressing the shutter button will introduce camera movement, causing blur in the image.

There's another reason for using a tripod – I'd recommend that you use Live View, if using a DSLR. This offers several advantages. Firstly, you can preview the exposure on the shot. This means that any exposure errors can be easily corrected. It makes sure that the mirror is up and cannot introduce any movement as the mirror is raised at the start of the exposure. It also uses the camera with the first shutter curtain open. FCES or First Curtain Electronic Shutter – which again prevents any movement from the first shutter curtain opening.

Why go to these lengths? Because working on a tripod with a small aperture – the images here were taken at f22 – means that your shutter speeds start to be in the range of 1/2 second to 1/50 second, where lots of problems can occur. These shots were taken on Av mode at ISO 100, which gave a shutter speed of 1/4 second. Longer than one second or about 1/60 second tends to not give so many problems.

Focusing

The focusing was set to a single AF point. If you have touch controls you can simply tap on-screen where you want the camera to focus. Remember that you need to focus about midway through the depth-of-field that you require.

The white balance was on AWB.

Shoot and tweak

The first image above is OK, but the background is a little dark.

So I added a reflector to the side, with the light directed onto the background. A reflector could simply be anything white or reflective (a sheet of cooking foil over some cardboard would work).

With the reflector added the background is a little brighter.

(For a more dramatic image you could also use a black background. Expect to need some compensation caused by the large amount of black in the image but it does keep the lighting simpler as you only need to light the subject. It also hides any dust on your sensor which shows up rather too well on a white background.)

To then produce the final image I needed a small amount of post-production. I used PhotoShop. A RAW file will automatically bring up the camera RAW but you can also use this interesting tool which simplifies the post-production process a bit with JPEGs (yes the camera RAW filter allows the RAW corrections to be used on JPG images!) by going to the filter menu and selecting it from there.

The image below shows the Camera RAW filter being accessed for JPEG files.

The adjustments I performed were as follows.

Highlights and whites were taken up to improve the background brightness. This has a minor effect on the subject. The texture was taken up which improves some of the details in the shot and the clarity was taken down to reduce some of thecontrast. Then the vibrance and saturation were both taken up a small amount. This was all that was done to the image. The final image is below.