Macro Food Photography: A Guide to Macro Lenses

Having a macro lens in your food photography kit will allow you to look at your food in new, creative ways, creating some jaw-dropping, stop in your tracks images. Who doesn&#;t want that?

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I asked you all on Instagram what your biggest challenge was when it came to macro food photography, and the most common answer was nailing focus &#; I hear ya!

In this post we&#;re going to look at what makes a macro lens different, and how to use it so you&#;ll be able to create those tack sharp, beautiful macro food photography compositions you&#;re just dying to create.

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Stop guessing and start implementing with my foolproof composition system. Elevate your food photography from good to great with composition techniques.

What is a macro lens?

A macro lens is a special type of camera lens that has the ability to work with very short focusing distances, taking sharp images of very small subjects.

A true macro lens has a magnification ratio of 1:1 (or greater), and a minimum focus distance around 30cm.

But what does that mean?

A magnification ratio of 1:1 means that the ratio of the subject size on the sensor plane is the same, or greater than the actual real life size of your subject. That&#;s what makes macro lenses able to take those super sharp, close up images of things like insects.

If you see a lens with a magnification ratio of 1:1 or 2:1 or 3:1 etc&#; it&#;s a macro lens.

If the magnification ratio is 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 etc&#; it&#;s not a macro lens.

But macro lenses aren&#;t only good for shooting close up detailed images. Depending on the focal length you choose, your macro lens also makes an incredible portrait lens, which is ideal for macro food photography.

Choosing the focal length of your macro lens

When choosing a macro lens, the first step is to know whether you&#;re shooting on a full frame or a crop sensor camera.

A lens on a crop sensor camera will behave like a longer focal length lens than it actually is. This is called the equivalent focal length, and you can figure it out by multiplying the crop factor of your camera by the focal length of the lens you&#;re using.

50mm x 1.6 = 80mm
Therefore the equivalent focal length = 80mm

Read my full post about focal length and food photography lenses here.

When I was working with a crop sensor camera, I used a 60mm macro. This acted like a 90mm on my crop sensor, allowing me to get a shallow depth of field in my photos, as well as a tight crop. Now on a full frame, I shoot with a 90mm macro lens, but anything from 90-105mm is great for food photography.

In these two photos, I shot the same scene at the same angle with a 90mm macro lens, and a 55mm non macro lens, so you can see the effect the different focal lengths have on the photo. Even though the front of the baking tray is in the same position in both photos, the field of view is much wider on the 55mm lens.

Neither of these focal lengths are &#;right&#; or &#;wrong&#;, but a tighter crop typically produces a more visually pleasing composition for these kinds of shots of small subjects.

I&#;ve put together a free food photography composition planning kit for you, you can download it by clicking below!

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Stop guessing and start implementing with my foolproof composition system. Elevate your food photography from good to great with composition techniques.

It&#;s important to note that when you&#;re shooting the kind of photo above (ie. not the super close up range photos), you&#;re not actually using the macro capabilities of the lens &#; at this point it&#;s acting in the same way as any other 90mm lens.

So why would you bother buying a macro lens for food photography? Well&#; simply for versatility. By having the option to create beautiful, tightly cropped compositions and super sharp, detailed close ups, you can do a LOT more with just one lens.

I could use the minimum focus distance of my macro lens to get closer to this cake to produce the composition I wanted In this shot I could get very close to the sprinkles while keeping them in focus, utilising the macro capabilities of my lens

Minimum Focus Distance

The Minimum focus distance of a lens determines how close you can be to your subject with it still in focus.

Generally speaking, the longer the focal length, the further you must be from your subject to be able to focus on it.

For example, the Canon EF 100mm f/2 USM (not a macro lens) has a minimum focus distance of 91cm, whereas the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM has a minimum focus distance of 31cm.

This means if you were shooting with the 100mm f/2 (not macro), you would need to be at least 91cm away from your subject to even be able to focus on your subject.

Whereas with the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, you could be anywhere from 31cm away and create a tack sharp photo.

This gives you an extra 60cm of space to play with in your compositions. So more than just those super close up shots, you can create completely different compositions with the macro lens and still have your subject in focus.

Using the right lens for your food photography composition is essential. Download my free composition planning kit below &#;

Free Resource

Stop guessing and start implementing with my foolproof composition system. Elevate your food photography from good to great with composition techniques.

Photos like this of these cupcakes just aren&#;t possible without the macro lens.

Using a macro lens allowed me to get close enough to the cupcakes to create this tight food portrait, while still keeping my subject in focus.

Magnification

A macro lens has a magnification factor of 1.0x or 1:1, which allows it to reproduce a life sized image of your subject on the camera&#;s sensor.

This means you can get really, really close to something and it will still be in focus.

Sometimes you will see lenses that have a magnification ratio of 1:2 labelled as &#;macro&#;, but a true macro lens has a magnification ratio of 1:1.

Depth of Field (DoF)

One important thing to keep in mind when doing macro food photography is that the DoF is very limited when shooting at close range.

In order to create images where everything in your scene is in focus (ie. sitting within the DoF), you&#;re going to have to use a much narrower aperture (higher F-Stop number), to get the same effect of the depth of field you would at normal range.

In these examples of frozen raspberries taken at close range, you can see the difference in how much of the shot is in focus, even at narrow apertures like f/14. Particularly look at the raspberry on the top left to see the difference in the DoF, even at f/8 we&#;re seeing a lot of background blur.

An example of different apertures at close range on a macro lens. The proximity to the subject creates a much shallower depth of field, so to get all the raspberries in focus, I needed to shoot at f/22.

At this type of magnification, it doesn&#;t take much for things to start to go soft. Getting the majority of your subject on the same plane of focus will help you keep as much of it as sharp as possible. Many macro shooters employ a technique called &#;focus stacking&#; to combat this softness, but that&#;s a topic for another post!

Stability

I consider a tripod a must in food photography the majority of the time. Not only does it allow you to nail down your compositions, but a good tripod will hold your camera steady so your macro shots are clear and sharp.

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Having your camera on a stable base will also allow you to stop down your aperture and shoot with a slower shutter speed so that you can get more of your subject in focus. This is particularly useful if you shoot in natural light, and can&#;t increase the power of your light.

Focus

Due to the magnified nature of macro photography, nailing focus is incredibly important &#; plus this is the thing that most of you said you struggle with in macro food photography on Instagram.

When you&#;re capturing such a fine amount of detail on your food, the smallest adjustment in focus can make or break your photo.

Nailing the focus allowed me to capture every ripple of detail in this chocolate cake batter

While most macro lenses have built-in autofocus, I really recommend you shoot in manual focus mode. Manual focus allows you to manually define exactly where the plane of focus lies relative to your camera&#;s sensor.

If you do prefer to use autofocus, using single point (often labelled as AF-S) is the most accurate way to do this in food photography. This will allow you to select the specific point on your sensor that your focus point should be, allowing your camera to accurately focus at that distance.

Macro Food Photography Composition

As you can see by now, using a macro lens for food photography can help you create some compositions that aren&#;t otherwise possible.

It&#;s a lens I love having in my kit, and use the most often.

When thinking about planning your food photography compositions, I&#;ve created a printable composition planning kit for you, so you can walk into your shoot with a vision. Click below to download it!

Free Resource

Stop guessing and start implementing with my foolproof composition system. Elevate your food photography from good to great with composition techniques.

The word &#;macro&#; has become synonymous with close-up photography. Most compact cameras having a macro shooting mode, and a large number of zoom lenses feature the word &#;macro&#; in their title. 

Typically, these lenses can reproduce small objects at up to 0.5x life size on a camera&#;s imaging sensor. In most cases, dedicated macro prime lenses go further still, enabling full 1.0x or 1:1 magnification at their closest focusing distances.

That might not sound particularly impressive, but bear in mind that an APS-C format image sensor is only about the size of a standard postage stamp. You&#;re therefore filling the entire image frame with something very small and, once the captured image is displayed on a screen or printed on paper, the degree of enlargement is enormous &#; a macro lens can reveal almost microscopic levels of detail, and make tiny bugs look like giant alien invaders.   

The key question is: what makes a &#;good&#; macro lens? Let&#;s take a look at the specifications and features that are important to consider. 

How to choose the right lens 

Most standard zoom lenses give a maximum magnification factor of about 0.3x. Zoom lenses, and even some prime lenses with a &#;macro&#; badge, give a greater magnification of around 0.5x. But if you&#;re buying a lens for close-up photography, a macro prime that gives a full 1.0x magnification is the best choice.  Taking things to the extreme, the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 delivers a monstrous 5.0x maximum magnification, but it&#;s notoriously difficult and fiddly to use, and generally best avoided. 

Image 1 of 3

Most &#;standard&#; zoom lenses can deliver a maximum magnification factor of about 0.3x. Here&#;s what that looks like on a full-frame camera body

And here&#;s what a macro lens with a 1.0x magnification factor looks like on the same camera

Using a macro lens on a camera with an APS-C format image sensor gives greater &#;effective&#; magnification, due to the crop factor

As we&#;ve mentioned, a 1.0x magnification factor reproduces an object at full life size on a camera&#;s sensor. There&#;s a bonus if you&#;re using an APS-C format camera with a 1.5x or 1.6x crop factor, as you&#;ll fill more of the image frame with smaller objects, giving greater &#;effective&#; magnification. It&#;s a similar effect to the way that crop-sensor cameras boost the effective telephoto reach of a lens.   

There are several macro prime lenses on the market that are designed exclusively for APS-C format cameras. However, you&#;re often better off buying a full-frame compatible macro lens. They&#;re generally not much larger, heavier or more expensive, and you&#;ll avoid any heartache if you upgrade to a full-frame camera body in the future. 

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Focal length

A crucial consideration when choosing a macro lens is the focal length. Unlike when buying regular lenses, it&#;s not really about wide-angle coverage or telephoto reach. Instead, it&#;s all about the minimum focusing distance. Macro lenses with a longer focal length have a correspondingly longer minimum focusing distance, putting more working space between you and what you&#;re shooting when you need to maximize magnification. 

For example, the Nikon AF-S DX 40mm f/2.8G Micro lens (Nikon uses &#;Micro&#; instead of macro in its lens classifications) has a minimum focusing distance of 16cm. That might sound reasonable, but the focusing distance is always measured from the &#;focal plane&#; of the camera, corresponding to the active surface of the image sensor. This is towards the rear of the camera body and, once you take into account the depth of the body and the length of the lens, the front of the Nikon 40mm lens extends to a mere 3.5cm from the subject. That&#;s less than 1.5 inches, and uncomfortably close for many types of macro photography, especially if you&#;re trying to shoot bugs and other small wildlife. 

For intimate subjects, you'll want a lens with a decent working distance

Even for inanimate objects, the closeness of the lens will often cast a shadow over what you&#;re shooting, blocking out ambient light. At the other end of the scale, 150mm and 180mm macro prime lenses have minimum focus distances of around 38cm and 47cm respectively, giving you plenty of breathing space, but they tend to be expensive. 

All things considered, macro lenses with a focal length of between 90mm and 105mm are the most popular

All things considered, macro lenses with a focal length of between 90mm and 105mm are most popular. They&#;re a manageable size and weight, affordable to buy, and have a convenient minimum focus distance of around 30cm. 

The distance between the front of the lens and the subject will typically be around 14cm, which feels very natural for close-up shooting. To maintain this, most current macro lenses have internal focusing mechanisms, so that the front element of the lens neither rotates nor extends, and doesn&#;t encroach on the subject at short focus settings. 

Autofocus is an important factor for most photographers these days. Given that macro prime lenses also work well for portraiture and general short telephoto shooting, a fast, accurate and quiet autofocus system is good to have.

For extreme close-ups, however, you&#;re more likely to focus manually, due to the tiny depth of field (which we&#;ll come to in the next section). A smoothly operating manual focus ring with plenty of rotational travel helps to enable very precise adjustments. It&#;s a major bonus in a macro lens. The optical quality at very narrow apertures is also important, as you&#;re likely to have to use narrow apertures to gain even a little depth of field. 

Image stabilization

Increasingly, macro prime lenses nowadays feature image stabilization. Some, like the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM and the latest edition of the Tamron SP 90mm f/2.8 Di VC USD Macro, have &#;hybrid&#; stabilizers. These are more effective for close-up shooting, as they correct for vertical/horizontal shift in the camera as well as the more usual vibration or &#;wobble&#; associated with handheld photography. But while stabilization is nice to have for general and moderately close-up shooting, it&#;s of negligible benefit for extreme close-ups. 

Tamron's SP 90mm f/2.8 Di VC USD features a hybrid image stabilization system

Overall then, we&#;d recommend a macro lens with a 90mm to 105mm focal length, a fairly fast f/2.8 aperture rating, good autofocus and manual focus facilities, plus effective image stabilization if your camera doesn&#;t have built-in, sensor-shift stabilization.

The autofocus, fast aperture and stabilizer are more for portraiture and general short-telephoto shooting than for macro photography, but it&#;s always nice for a lens to have multitasking capabilities. 

Contact us to discuss your requirements of Custom Micro Lenses. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.