Chapter 19 — Exercises

Macro is learned at arm's reach, so most of these send you to a window, a tabletop, or a thirty-metre stretch of trail with whatever lets you get close — a macro lens, extension tubes, a diopter, a reversed lens, or a phone with a clip-on. There is no wrong path here; the cheapest ones are genuinely good. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything you shoot — your best close-up feeds the Portfolio.

A note on gear: every exercise below can be done with a phone and a clip-on macro lens (or even a phone's built-in macro mode). Where a step assumes a focus ring or a small aperture, the phone path is given in the chapter (§19.3, §19.5) — adapt and keep going.

A note on how to practice these well: macro punishes haste. The single biggest improvement most beginners can make is to slow down — set up on a tripod or a steady surface, light deliberately, and decide where the thin slice of sharpness must fall before you press the shutter. Treat each exercise as a chance to make one considered frame rather than fifty hopeful ones. And keep your failures: a ghosted stack or a muddy f/22 frame, understood, teaches more than a lucky success you can't explain. Where an exercise says "keep your best," also keep your worst and write one line on why it failed — that pairing is where the learning lives.

Part A — Understanding magnification (Settings Drill & measurement)

Exercise 19.1 ⭐ — Measure your magnification with a ruler. Photograph a ruler, filling the frame with as much of its length as your closest focus allows. Read how many millimetres span the long edge of the frame. Look up your sensor's long edge (full-frame ≈ 36mm; typical crop ≈ 24mm; your phone's main sensor is a few mm — estimate or look it up). Compute your reproduction ratio (sensor long edge : millimetres of ruler in frame). Write down the ratio and whether it qualifies as "true macro" (≥1:1). Repeat for each magnification path you own.

Exercise 19.2 ⭐⭐ — The crop-vs-magnify proof. Photograph one small textured subject (a coin, a stamp, a leaf) two ways: (a) as close as your gear allows, filling the frame; (b) from a metre away, then cropping the file until the subject appears the same size on screen. View both at 100%. Write three sentences on the difference in recorded detail, and explain why magnification — not on-screen size — is what determined it.

Exercise 19.3 ⭐⭐ — Working-distance audit. For each close-focus method you have, find the working distance (lens front to subject) at your maximum magnification by measuring with a second ruler. Make a small table: method, magnification, working distance. Then write one sentence per method on what that working distance allows or forbids (lighting room? live insects?).

Exercise 19.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Spec a macro lens for a job. You are asked to photograph (a) jewelry on a tabletop and (b) live dragonflies at a pond. For each job, state which focal-length class of macro lens you would choose (short ~60mm, mid ~100mm, long ~180mm) and defend the choice in terms of working distance and lighting — not sharpness. Note where the two jobs genuinely differ.

Part B — The depth-of-field problem (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

Exercise 19.5 ⭐ — Watch depth collapse. Pick one subject with depth (a small toy figure, a flower seen from the side, your own knuckles). Keeping the same aperture (try f/8), photograph it focused far away across the room, then move in to your closest macro focus and shoot again. Compare how much is sharp in each. In one sentence, name which depth-of-field lever caused the change. The aim of this drill is to feel, viscerally, that the same aperture gives you a deep scene far away and almost nothing up close — so that you stop blaming your aperture for the thin slice and start respecting focus distance as the real culprit. If you can, repeat at three distances (far, medium, closest) and note how the sharp zone shrinks faster than you'd expect as you close in.

Exercise 19.6 ⭐⭐ — The aperture sweep and the diffraction wall. Lock your camera on a tripod (or steady it firmly) and frame a flat, detailed subject (a banknote, a printed page, a leaf) straight-on. Shoot the identical frame at f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and the smallest aperture you have (f/22 or f/32). View all at 100%. Identify the aperture where overall sharpness peaks and where diffraction starts to soften the whole frame. Write your system's practical ceiling.

Exercise 19.7 ⭐⭐ — Parallel vs. angled. Photograph a flat subject (a coin or a watch face) twice at f/8: once with your sensor parallel to it (straight down), once tilted at ~30°. Compare edge-to-edge sharpness. Explain in two sentences why parallel alignment is "free depth of field."

Exercise 19.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Place the slice on purpose. Find a subject where the most important plane is obvious (an insect's eye, the front petal of a flower, the engraved face of a ring). Shoot it three times, deliberately putting the thin slice of sharpness on a different plane each time (front, middle, back). Choose which version "works" and write why placing the sharpness on the right plane changes whether the image reads as a portrait or a mistake.

Part C — Reaching magnification on a budget (Shoot This)

Exercise 19.9 ⭐ — Tubes or diopter, first light. Using extension tubes, a close-up diopter, a reversed lens, or a phone clip-on — whatever you have — photograph the closest, most detailed thing you can find in your home. Note what you gained (magnification) and what you lost (light? infinity focus? autofocus?). One frame, kept, with a caption stating the trade-off you accepted.

Exercise 19.10 ⭐⭐ — Compare two paths on one subject. If you have more than one close-focus method, photograph the same subject with each at matched framing. Compare sharpness (especially the corners), color fringing, and ease of use. Rank them and write one sentence on which you'd grab first and why. (Phone-only readers: compare built-in macro mode vs. a clip-on lens.) Pay special attention to the corners and edges — that's where cheap diopters and reversed lenses show their weakness, while extension tubes (no glass) usually hold up. Also weigh convenience honestly: the "best" path is the one you'll actually carry and set up, not the one with the highest theoretical sharpness. Note which path lets you light the subject most easily — that often matters more than a sliver of edge sharpness.

Exercise 19.11 ⭐⭐⭐ — Go past life-size. Reach beyond 1:1. Reverse a cheap wide prime on a reversing ring, stack extension tubes, add a strong diopter, or push your phone clip-on to its limit. Photograph something where extreme magnification reveals something (the facets of a sugar crystal, the scales on a moth's wing, the print pattern of a banknote). Measure your magnification with the ruler trick (Exercise 19.1) and report it. Expect a tiny working distance and a paper-thin slice — manage both.

Part D — Lighting small subjects (Shoot This)

Exercise 19.12 ⭐ — The lens-shadow demonstration. Get close to a subject with the light coming from behind the camera. Photograph the shadow your own lens casts on the subject. Then move the same light forward and to the side, past the front of the lens, and reshoot. Keep both. One sentence on what moving the light around the barrel fixed.

Exercise 19.13 ⭐⭐ — Build a sandwich-bag diffuser. Take any small hard light (a phone torch, an LED, a flash). Shoot a textured small subject with the bare source — note the harsh glints and hard shadows. Then diffuse the source through a translucent sandwich bag, vellum, or a sheet of paper and reshoot. Compare. Explain in two sentences why "large relative to the subject" makes a sheet of paper a soft source at this scale.

Exercise 19.14 ⭐⭐ — Side light + fill, the micro-portrait. Run the chapter's kitchen-window assignment formally (§19.4). One small subject; soft window light raking from the side; a white card on the shadow side for fill. Shoot it (a) frontally lit, (b) side-lit no fill, (c) side-lit with fill. Pick the best, and write one sentence each on what the side light and the fill card contributed. Treat this as a portrait sitting for an object: you are looking for the gradient of light to shadow that makes a face — or a seashell — read as three-dimensional. Watch specifically for the moment the side light reveals texture the frontal version hid (the ridges of the shell, the fuzz on a leaf), and for how much shadow the card "opens up" without flattening the light. This is Chapter 13's window-light portrait shrunk to thumbnail scale, and the lesson is identical.

Exercise 19.15 ⭐⭐⭐ — Backlight a translucent or jeweled subject. Find something that glows when lit from behind: a leaf, a slice of citrus held to a window, a dewdrop, a glass of water with bubbles, a feather. Light it from behind (window or a source beyond the subject), exposing for the bright part and letting the background fall dark. Make Figure 19.6's "backlit dew" the spiritual target. Keep your best frame.

Part E — Focus stacking (Shoot This)

Exercise 19.16 ⭐ — A three-frame stack. Lock your camera on a tripod and frame a small, perfectly still subject with some depth (a screw, a small shell, a dried flower). At f/8, shoot three frames: focused on the front, middle, and back. You don't need to merge them yet — just lay them side by side and confirm that between them the whole subject is sharp somewhere. This is the raw material of a stack.

Exercise 19.17 ⭐⭐ — A real stack, merged. Repeat with as many frames as the subject's depth needs (overlapping each focus step), then merge them in a focus-stacking app or your camera maker's software. Compare the merged result with your best single f/8 frame and with a single f/22 frame. Write three sentences: what the stack gained over one frame, and why it beats f/22. This is the chapter's centerpiece technique, so do it carefully: lock the camera down, keep the subject and the air still, fix your exposure and white balance in manual, and march focus from the very front to the very back in small overlapping steps. View all three results at 100% — the stack should be crisp throughout while the f/22 frame looks deeper but softer overall. If your stack has problems, don't move on until you've diagnosed them with Exercise 19.19 and 19.23; a clean stack is the single most satisfying skill in this chapter.

Exercise 19.18 ⭐⭐ — Auto-bracket the focus. If your camera has focus bracketing / focus shift, set it up: choose a subject, pick a frame count and step size, and let it fire the sequence. Compare the ease and result with your hand-stepped stack from 19.17. Note the frame count and step that worked. (Phone-only: do the manual multi-frame + app version from §19.5 and report how it went.)

Exercise 19.19 ⭐⭐⭐ — Find the gap. Deliberately shoot a stack with too few frames so there is a gap between two focus steps, and merge it. Locate the unsharp band the gap produced in the merged image. Then reshoot with generous overlap and confirm the band is gone. Write what this teaches about why "overlap generously" is the rule.

Part F — Read the Frame & Fix the Photo

Exercise 19.20 ⭐⭐ — Read a macro frame. Write a full six-field Described Photograph (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON) of one of your own close-ups. Name the working distance you used, where the thin slice fell, and one thing you'd change. Specific enough that a reader could reshoot it. This is the single best exercise for training your macro eye, and it doubles as alt-text practice (Chapter 1's accessibility note): you cannot describe a frame's light and structure until you've truly looked at them. Be honest in THE EFFECT field about where the eye actually lands first — if it lands somewhere other than your intended subject, you've found the thing to fix.

Exercise 19.21 ⭐⭐ — Fix the muddy macro. A described shot: "A beetle photographed head-on, shot at f/29 to 'get it all sharp.' The whole frame looks soft and low-contrast; even the eyes aren't crisp. Lit by the camera's pop-up flash from straight on; the shell looks flat and there's a hard black shadow behind." Diagnose every error and prescribe the exact reshoot (aperture, depth strategy, lighting).

Exercise 19.22 ⭐⭐ — Fix the spooked insect. A described failure: "You tried to photograph a butterfly with a 60mm macro. Every time you got close enough to fill the frame, it flew off. The few frames you got are from too far away and look like snapshots." Diagnose the root cause and prescribe the gear and approach change that fixes it.

Exercise 19.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the dead stack. A described failure: "You shot a 30-frame focus stack of a flower in the garden and the merge came out a blurry, ghosted mess with doubled edges." List the three most likely causes (think: what must hold still, and what must stay constant frame to frame) and how you'd prevent each on the reshoot.

Part G — Finding subjects (Eye Training)

Exercise 19.24 ⭐ — The arm's-reach safari. Run the chapter's safari (§19.6): one hour, one room or thirty metres of trail, twenty frames of twenty different subjects within arm's reach that you've never photographed. No subject repeats. Choose three and write the "landscape reading" for each (foreground anchor, leading line, light, moment).

Exercise 19.25 ⭐⭐ — The kitchen gallery. Without buying anything, make five strong close-ups using only items from your kitchen and recycling bin (citrus, sugar, fabric weave, bubbles, rust, the eye of a needle). Bring each to the window light. The constraint is the point: prove subject scarcity is a myth.

Exercise 19.26 ⭐⭐ — Light Log, micro edition. Add three days of macro-scale entries to your Light Log (from Chapter 5): for each, note how the light behaved at this scale — did a sheet of paper act like an overcast sky? did moving the source a few centimetres change everything? No camera required for the writing.

Exercise 19.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — One subject, ten ways. Choose a single humble subject (a feather, a flower, a leaf) and make ten genuinely different close-ups of it — different scale, light direction, background, plane of focus, backlit vs. side-lit. Lay them out together. Write which one you'd hang and why. This teaches working-the-scene (Chapter 9) at macro scale.

Part H — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 19.28 ⭐⭐ — Expose for the highlight. Photograph a backlit translucent subject (citrus, leaf) so the bright part is correctly exposed and not blown out. Read your histogram (Chapter 3): confirm the brightest tone sits just below clipping at the right wall. Write what you adjusted to protect the highlight.

Exercise 19.29 ⭐⭐ — Compose with the grammar. Make a macro frame that deliberately uses two composition tools from Part II (Chapter 6): say, place your sharp anchor on a rule-of-thirds power point and use leaf veins as leading lines into it. Name the two tools you used and whether they strengthened the frame.

Exercise 19.30 ⭐⭐⭐ — The full deliberate close-up. Make one portfolio-candidate macro frame in which you consciously decide all four decisions from Chapter 1 (light, moment, frame, focus) plus the two macro decisions (working distance and where the thin slice falls). Narrate the six decisions out loud before shooting. Keep it; it may be your Portfolio Checkpoint image.

Part I — Recreate It & Reflection (Portfolio)

Exercise 19.31 ⭐⭐ — Recreate a Blossfeldt. After studying Case Study 19.1, find your own "architecture in a weed": a single plant structure with strong geometry (a fern frond, a seed head, a curl of vine, the spiral center of a flower). Photograph it Blossfeldt's way — magnify and isolate it against a plain or thrown-dark background, light it with plain, soft, even daylight from slightly to the side, and choose the specimen at its most geometric stage. The goal: make a common plant stop looking like a plant and start looking like designed architecture.

Exercise 19.32 ⭐⭐⭐ — Recreate the backlit dew (Figure 19.6). Find dew on a web (or fake it: mist a spider's web, a seed head, or a wire fence with a spray bottle on a still morning). Backlight it so each droplet glows against a dark background, expose for the bright beads, and put your sharp anchor droplet on a power point. This combines backlight (§19.4), the thin-slice discipline (§19.2), and composition (Chapter 6) in one frame. Keep your best; it's a strong portfolio candidate.

Exercise 19.33 ⭐⭐ — The Portfolio Checkpoint. Produce your Chapter 19 keeper exactly as the Portfolio Checkpoint describes: one frame-filling close-up that reveals a detail the eye normally misses, with deliberate light, deliberate plane of focus, and — if the subject is deep and still — a focus stack. Shoot at least twenty frames across two or three subjects; keep the one that is both technically clean and genuinely revealing. Add it to your Portfolio folder and write one sentence on the detail it reveals and how it sits beside your landscape (Ch.16), street (Ch.17), and architecture (Ch.18) keepers.

Exercise 19.34 ⭐⭐ — Teach the thin slice. Explain to someone (a friend, a journal, a camera pointed at yourself) why depth of field collapses up close and why stopping down to f/22 makes it worse, using two of your own frames as evidence (a single f/8 shot and a single f/22 shot of the same subject). Teaching forces clarity; if you can explain the diffraction trade-off with your own images, you own it.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 19.35 ⭐⭐⭐ — A week of the small world. For seven days, make one close-up per day of a different ordinary subject, all on the same gear you own today, each revealing something the eye misses. On day seven, lay the week out together and choose the strongest. You will see your macro seeing — your instinct for scale, light, and the telling detail — sharpen across just seven days. Note which day's image is best and what changed in how you were looking.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each at arm's reach before reading them — in macro, the attempt is the lesson, and the subject is always closer than you think.