technique

Where so far this guide has focussed on some of the rather technical aspects of photography, we're now moving on to a specific technique: macro. Macro photography is the rather confusingly named practice of taking pictures of really small things. Popular subjects are insects and flowers, but anything that is either really small or has a lot of small detail will do. The way this is achieved is by getting very close to the subject and the defining aspect of macro photography is therefor very short focussing distances.

Photography is a fun hobby, but it is also a rather technical one. Of course it's the final image that counts and artistic should trumph gadgettery, but to get the best results one needs to know the gear. This guide gives an introduction to some of the more technical aspects of photography which are nonetheless essential for making ebtter pictures. Understanding this information will open up new artistic possibilities to a beginning photography.

In any shooting mode except for manual, the camera calculates at least one of the shooting parameters for you. To do so, it measures the light coming in Through The Lens (TTL). Cameras have several ways of measuring and calculating the amount of light in a scene, which are called Metering Modes. Which modes are available depends on the camera model, but most olympus cameras have the following modes: Digital ESP, Center-weighted, Spot, Highlight spot, Shadow spot. These will be discussed later on but first we'll look at how metering works in general.

Your camera has four primary shooting modes, which differ in what parameters you can control and which are calculated automatically (and how):

When taking a picture, you focus on a specific distance. In theory only points that are this distance from your camera are perfectly in focus. In practice however we find that points some distance closer and some distance farther away are also sharp. They aren't exactly in focus, but they are "close enough" for us not to notice. The range in front and behind the focus distance where focus is "close enough" is called the depth of field.

Three parameters control the exposure of an image: