I have been thinking about three pieces of hardware that I might make use of: a Sony A7r ii camera, an Olympus E-M1 III camera and a Panasonic Leica 50-200 lens. I'm thinking of working through my thinking about these three options here on the blog; I find that writing things down can help organise my thinking and knowing that someone else might read it encourages me to be thorough, which given the cost of these pieces of kit would be a rather good thing. However, before starting on that I think there are some preliminaries to get out of the way. The first relates to the word "macro".
The bottom line for me is that the way "macro" is defined has no practical impact on my photography. For example, I never have thoughts along the line of "This is going to be a macro, so it is appropriate to do/use X" (and X wouldn't be appropriate to do/use if it was going to be a close-up rather than a macro).
So in that sense, I don't really care how the word is defined. I tend to use a non-committal "close-up/macro" a lot of the time; no one seems to argue with that. When I'm "amongst friends" online who don't get hung up on this sort of stuff I'll sometimes refer to my flower images as "close-ups" and my invertebrate images as "macros", even though by just about any definition you choose to use both of those usages can be wrong in some circumstances if you want to get picky about it; think very small flowers (macros not close-ups) and very large insects (close-ups not macros).
However, I see periodic and sometimes ill-natured arguments online about what "macro" means. Some people have very strong views about this and lay down the law about the true and indisputable facts of the matter. The claim that irks me most is along the lines of "Only images that are of 1:1 magnification on the sensor [what is on the sensor is the same size as in the scene] or higher are macros". I have several issues with this.
First, it is one thing to say that you prefer that definition, or that it is commonly used, or that you find it useful. It is quite different, and wrong, to say that it is the correct definition. Definitions cannot be correct (or incorrect); they are a matter of ..... well .... definition. There can be alternative definitions. For example I think a perfectly good definition of a "macro" image is that it is an image of a scene that is 25mm (an inch) or less tall . What makes a particular definition good or best is a judgement call, and that judgement can depend on the context, as illustrated by the following examples.
If you are using a macro lens with a maximum magnification of 1:1 (and you aren't using any additional bits and pieces like extensions tubes or close-up lenses) then almost none of your images will be macros according to the 1:1 definition. That is because the only ones that will be macros are when the lens is used at its absolute maximum magnification. A definition that only applies in one special circumstance seems not very good to me.
As another example, you can have two images of the same scene, with the same framing, same depth of field, same everything in their appearance, but one of them may be a macro and the other might not. For example, in the illustration below we see four uncropped images. The image at the top left is a macro, while the one on the right is not, even though it frames exactly the same scene. What is worse, the two images at the bottom are not macros either, despite being closer in on the subject than the one that is a macro. What of practical use can we make of knowing whether or not these are "macros"? None that I can think of.
What is going on here is that the image at the top left was captured with a macro lens at 1:1. The image on the sensor was life size, and hence the image is a macro according to the 1:1 definition. The others were captured using a camera with a much smaller sensor (using a close-up lens), and in all three cases the image on the sensor was smaller than life size, and so they are not macros.
I quite like the idea of using a definition of "macro" which says that (uncropped) images of scenes less than around an inch (25mm) tall are "macros", while images of scenes that while small are taller than that are "close-ups", and scenes that are smaller than 2.5mm tall are "micro".
Those definitions are almost exactly the same as the 1:1 definition as it applies to full frame cameras (and also the related 10:1 or greater definition of a photomicrographic image). They have the great advantage that they apply equally to all cameras independent of sensor size. So you don't have to do any mental gymnastics to work out whether or not it applies to a particular image when using a different sensor size, and you don't have to know (or try to work out) what magnification you were using to get the shot (with a lot of setups working that out may be distinctly non-trivial, or impossible).
However, I can't see these definitions catching on - no one is promoting them. So I shall continue to refer to "close-up/macro" in an attempt to skirt around the minefield that is "macro".
No comments:
Post a Comment