THINK SMALL

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to build a robust, mobile, macro lighting setup that you can take anywhere

- Jason Parnell-Brookes

30 MINS

In this Crash Course we're going to show you how to make your own macro lighting setup that will work anywhere, at any time, and save space in your camera bag - and best of all it doesn't cost a great deal of money. There's no need for clunky ring flashes, or dual flash heads that sit on the end of your lens - you need just one flashgun, a lens, a flash bracket, a wired flash trigger and a light diffuser to make a robust, mobile, macro studio. Diffusing the light is the extra step that will enable you to capture studio-quality portraits of your macro subjects.

You can mount everything together using the flash bracket, and you can lock in the settings you need to ensure that you get perfect results every time. Here's how it's done...

STEP BY STEP MACRO ON A BUDGET

1 REVERSE GEAR

A macro lens or even a kit lens is fine for this shoot, but we opted to reverse a wide-angle lens to keep our kit as light and as cheap as possible, so we used a 24mm f/2.8 lens with our DSLR. Whatever lens you use, switch it to manual focus and choose the minimum focusing distance.

2 DOWN TO THE WIRE