Macro pictures can be found just about anywhere and they’re a lot of fun to take. Let me show you how to best set up your camera to optimize it for macro pictures. The first thing that you want to do is turn your mode dial to the program mode. This will give you the flexibility needed in order to set it up. Let’s go ahead and turn that on. Let’s quickly just walk through the function menu to make sure that everything is the way we’d like it. Press the function button here in the center to access the function menu. And at the top, you’ll notice that my ISO is set to 200. I would like to start at 50 because I really don’t know what the lighting situation is going to be like, so I’m going to just scroll down to 50 and set that there, so that should be find. That is going to give me the best color quality that the camera can produce. If I need higher than that, then I could adjust it accordingly, but let’s go ahead and just start it at 50 ISO.

Go ahead and go down. The white balance, mine is currently set to daylight. This really depends on your lighting situation. If you’re outdoors on a sunny day, daylight is what you’re going to want to use, otherwise, you can choose from one of the other options. If it’s a cloudy day, go with cloudy. If you’re indoors, you can use either tungsten or fluorescent, those are both good options for indoor lighting and you can just scroll through all the options to see really which one will give you the best color possible. So I’m going to go to daylight and go down. Drive mode is currently set to single shot. It’s the default setting. And in this case, it’s fine. I’m assuming that we’re not using a tripod so there’s really no need to set the drive to the 2-second timer. Effect is turned off, that’s great. The flash compensation in this case is irrelevant because with macro pictures, you really don’t want to use the flash, so this doesn’t really matter. The metering mode is set to evaluative which also is fine. You can choose any one of these options. It really depends on your scenario but evaluative is just fine for macros. There’s really no difference.

Go ahead and press the function button to escape this menu. Now you’ll notice, as I mentioned before, we’re not going to use the flash. Mine camera indicates that the flash will not be used. If yours is not, go ahead and press the flash button or the up navigation button to scroll through the different flash options until you see that no flash icon.

Finally in the back, what you’re going to want to do obviously is set up the macro mode. The macro mode is the down navigation button here at the bottom. Press that once to access macro, that little flower indicates here in the macro mode and this will allow the camera to focus on subjects very close to the lens. A couple of things that you need to know when taking macro pictures, you want the zoom to be all the way out. So zoom out and physically step closer to the subject if you need it to fill up the entire frame. That’s going to get you a much better quality and the camera would be able to focus a lot more easily. So zoom out and press the shutter button halfway. This is true for every picture you take with the camera. Go ahead and press the shutter button halfway. Wait for that little green square to turn green which indicates the camera is in focus. And then you can go ahead and take the picture.

Now, after I pressed the button halfway, you’ll notice here at the bottom that my shutter speed is indicated. Currently, my shutter speed is 1/80 and that’s fine. Again, we’re assuming that we’re hand holding this camera so that’s fine. However, if you are indoors and there isn’t a whole lot of light or if you’re outdoors and there isn’t a whole lot of light, at this point, you would probably want to increase the ISO assuming your shutter speed is less than 160th. So with the shutter speed less than 160th of a second, the camera becomes very, very difficult to hand hold without getting any kind of a motion blur in the image. So go ahead and release, press the function button to access the menu again, scroll back to ISO, increase the ISO, press the function button to escape. And again, I’ll go ahead and press my shutter button, and you’ll see now that my shutter speed is at 1/400 of a second, much faster and much easier to hand hold. So again, in my case, I do have enough light 180th which is fine, however in your situation, if yours is below 160th, go ahead and adjust that ISO a little higher to compensate for that low shutter speed.