Macro Photography at Folly Beach

The beach was a good place to practice macro photography — small flowers, shells, grasses, and sand. I was using my Sony A6000 with a new macro lens and wanted to push the limits of what it could do.

Capturing small shells was incredibly difficult as the wind kept blowing the tiny sand grains around. The shell in the image may look large but would have easily fit on the tip of my finger.

You might be familiar with the work of Dr. Gary Greenburg, whose macro images of sand are extraordinary. While these tiny shells are striking, you can clearly see the crushed silica with no defined shape making up the majority of the particles in the photograph — all of it ground down by the waves.

I discovered when taking macro photos that the f-stop is critically important because it determines how much of the subject is in focus. With a macro lens, depth of field becomes razor-thin — even small aperture changes make a dramatic difference in what reads as sharp and what dissolves into blur.