I have been fascinated by close-up photographs for many years. I got this shot of a pinhole in my mum's iron using an instamatic camera and a pair of binoculars turned round the wrong way round.

pinhole on iron base

My childhood attempts produced many such odd images of strange minature worlds and I have been hooked on macro photography ever since.

Close Up or Macro photography is a great way of producing images that people don't normally get to see. Officially macro means a magnification of 1:1 or more.

The tools needed for macro photography range from the homemade setups costing next to nothing, up to the most expensive of all lenses.

aphid macro

The details you will see may well amaze you. In this photograph, aside from the aphid itself, we get to see the details of the plant stem that are simply not visible to the naked eye.

Your digital SLR camera will have a macro mode and an extension ring will allow you to use the basic lens to get pretty close.

butterfly close up

Indoors a good large reading lens (charity shops often sell them) will allow you to get close enough with the basic set up to take some amazing shots of snails and other insects.

Flowers are a cliche in close-up photography, but this is only to be expected. When nature is revealed in all its unconditional beauty to our eyes, we would be missing a soul if we did not want to capture the moment.

flower macro photograph

Spiders are also great subjects, as are their webs. Get out into the garden early in the morning and capture dew on a web.

spider web with dew

Get a macro lens and things get really exciting as your camera takes you to unimagined worlds. A lens giving you focal lengths around the 18-50mm mark is what you should be aiming at.

flower close up photography

If you haven't got the money for a dedicated lens, pop down to your local charity secondhand store and pick up an old camera with a removeable standard 50mm lens. This will cost less than a fiver in most cases.

Now if you set this up between your normal digital camera and the subject you can get some amazing ultra closeup images. You will have to fiddle about with lights and lock things down, since the slightest nudge will send it all out of focus, but with patience, you can enter the world of extreme macro phtography for next to nothing.

macro photograph of amber with prehistoric fly

I worked out that this setup enables me to shoot up to 10 times magnification

This shot of a piece of amber with a tiny prehistoric fly was my very first attempt at using a reversed 55mm macro lens as an enlarging lens. I was very pleased with it.