Macro - Different types of Light Sources at home

Macro lenses allow you to magnify and focus closely to your subjects. As yet I don't own a changeable macro lens however my canon D50 was purchased with a Macro (0.5m/1.6ft) Telephoto-Zoom Lens 28mm-135mm. The only downfall I would say is that the largest aperture available is only F3.5 where on macro only lenses they can be as large as F1.4, therefore giving you more creative play!

Below are some shots I took of some plants using ambient lighting via a window. As I was using natural light I set my camera to shoot with auto white balance to show the true colours of the leaves and plant stem. I took a variety of shots, not all fully macro, to show differences in depth of field.

The Cactus above was one of my favourite shots, again shot via window lighting

I then decided to photograph the same Cactus with the use of artificial lighting. Firstly with Halogen / tungsten, I used a work lamp and placed it at a 45/45 degree angle.

As you can see shooting with an automatic white balance with the use of halogen/tungsten lighting, gives a yellowish colour to your final image, however below shooting with the use of a Tungsten colour balance it corrects the final image to give a more natural look with no yellowish glow!

I then photographed the cactus using an incandescent light source. I used a table lamp which was fitted with an energy saving light bulb and positioned it at the same 45/45 degree as I did when a photographed the cactus using the work lamp.

Again as seen from shooting with an automatic white balance, incandescent lighting gives a similar yellowish glow as did when shooting with the use of halogen/tungsten. The below was photographed with the use of tungsten colour balance which again gave a more natural look to the final image.

Lastly I shot the same cactus with the use of fluorescent lighting. I placed the cactus in the middle of the kitchen, obviously not being able to experiment too much as the lighting is fixed to the kitchen ceiling however again it seems that the majority of artificial lighting gives a yellowish glow to your final images unless colour balance corrected!