Macro photography with indoor lights

Hi

I lost the oportunity to try my hand again and practise some macro shots on a few beautiful flowers I got today, there was a window of oportunity when the sun was shining for a couple of hours, but the garden was more urgent as I had trimmed (huge trim) some trees in my garden with the kind help from couple of friends and all the branches were still on the ground for days to be gotten rid of, shredding and chop the big ones into pieces for barbecue .




So clearing trees from the garden took priority (as you can see from the shot a 120 ft long garden was truly a mess, stayed like that through the snowy days ha ) and now I am here brooding looking at the flowers wanting to experiment. I have a couple of hours and am so eager to give it a go.

I have found out, with the help of some great and helpful advice from the more experienced ones here, that flash light really doesn't bring out the best from them and natural light is much better, so my question is, how would halogen spot lights work on the macros? I have some great halogen spot lights in the kitchen, and I suppose I could send the wife to watch Eastenders or whatever is showing on tv and lock myself in the kitchen and play around .

I know the best answer which I assume might come straightaway from someone is "try and see", but being a total newbie I would love some kind of reference point on what to base. I have already learnt that lack of light really affects a lot the images.

Thanks

Amin

Amin, let me be the first to say, "try and see"!

Bear in mind that the word "photography" literally means "painting with light".

Light is the single most important aspect of photography and different types of lights will produce different effects. There's no right or wrong way of lighting a subject, just different ones. Experimentation is something we all have to do when we first pick up a camera before we can define our own "look" - there's still no substitute for practice, practice, practice so have a go under your halogens.

Try varying their intensity of the light, the angle they hit the subject, the angle to the camera, etc; if they swivel right round then have a go at bouncing the light off walls in order to soften (diffuse) it and keep fiddling until you hit upon something you think looks good.

It'll all come to you in the end.