{Friday Photo Bliss}: Macro Nifty 50

It has been hot as Hades most of the summer, so I haven't been out shooting with my "real" camera much. However, I started to miss her and even though the heat index has reached 100 this week, I decided to pull out my dusty beloved big camera and practice shooting manual.

I remembered this "Nifty Fifty Macro" tutorial I wrote years ago and decided to create some fun macro images.  These images don't have the sharp focus of a real macro lens, but personally I love the tilt-lens artistic vibe coming off them. ;-)

All of the images below were shot in my backyard in hot, humid conditions with a 80-pound puppy following me around everywhere. Try taking a macro photo of a tiny flower when your giant puppy keeps on trying to lick your lens.

I used the new Pretty Presets "Pretty Film Pastels Collection" presets on all of these images. I love these presets, and found they work on so many different types of images, not just portraits.  My favorite for these edits was "Warm Blush".

I also used the new gorgeous textures from the Flypaper "Tempest Painterly" Texture set on many of my images below.

If you have a less-than-stellar macro image (because you are shooting with a cheap but amazing 50mm lens that is backwards on your camera!), I use a little editing trick to turn it into something special. Make a copy of the image in Photoshop and apply a high pass filter of 10-20 to that copy, and put the layer in overlay or soft light blending mode. Then add a texture to the image in soft light or overlay blending mode.

 This is my absolutely favorite one of the set.

This was growing on one of our fire-pit logs.

We have a few trees (well, it is actually a bush) that have colorful fall leaves.

I took about 10 shots of this little tiny weed flower and just happened to get a perfect one with my little ant friend.

I have a few roses left on my deer-eaten rosebushes.

This final image was taken with my Nifty 50, but this time I tried the free-lensing technique. I need a lot more practice, but it is so fun playing with my lens!

Do you want to download thousands of professional CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop actions (including exclusive ones not found anywhere for free), textures/overlays, scrapbooking papers, clip art/design elements, photo storyboards and frames, and Lightroom presets from this site in one convenient zipped file AND help support this one-woman blog?

Just click here for my CoffeeShop Mega Download Pack!