While you can file playing marbles at school in the same memory drawer as hopscotch and riding around on your chopper bicycle, they do make a great subject for an abstract macro project. Don’t worry about braving cobwebs and setting off your dust allergy by scrabbling around in the attic looking for them, though.
For some reason they are plentiful and cheap on Amazon, or even some toy shops if you can still find one. The big question is what type to get and why? You can get some with interior swirls and colors, but they can be distracting and less abstract than clear ones.
My suggestion is to look for those devoid of interior design, but ranging from completely transparent to ones with a range of colors. You’ll also need some colored, reflective card and perhaps some additional light to introduce color and highlights and also help with the reflections.
It’s worth starting with the clear marbles first, arranging them on top of your reflective card, with a card at the back to bounce light back into the scene. Unpack your macro lens and focus on one of the marbles at the front of the scene that leads into the rest. You should show some empty space in the foreground because the light reflections will appear there as well.
Setting it up
1. Camera position
It’s a very simple setup because it’s a macro shot, it’s just a case of getting in close enough. The more interesting element is arranging the marbles so that there is a key marble, and that there is space for reflections and others in the background.
2. Key light
This is the main light, which is set to a color temperature of 5600K along with the camera. Yes there’s window light, but it’s not as dominant as this light. I also decided to leave the curtains open, so that the shape of the window was reflected in the marble and because it also registered as more blue in color.
3. Box of marbles
It’s up to you what you use, but marbles without an interior pattern – being clear or colored – give a more interesting, abstract result with better reflections. Try different types, though, to see what you like. It’s also interesting to combine different colors of marbles with the color of the secondary light.
4. The background
For some shots with clear marbles I used this red, reflective card and also set the color of the light on the right to red as well. Then I tried the light with blue. The other combination was to used gold card for a more neutral effect, blue-colored marbles and a blue light to the right.
5. Secondary light
This was here to add highlights and additional reflections. On some of the shots it was red, on others it was blue. With the key light being set to 5600K, that’s why the white balance on the camera was manually set to 5600K to ensure this color registered.
Step by step guide for shooting macro marbles
It’s all about colors, depth of field and the types of reflections and highlights you can create.
01 Setting up for color
If you’re intending to use colored lighting in your photos, then you need to pay attention to the white balance setting on the camera so that it doesn’t attempt to filter it out. The key light was 5600K so, to get the color of the secondary light to register, the camera white balance was set manually to 5600K.
02 Release or timer
After a few shots it became evident that a narrow aperture was going to be the order of the day, which meant a low shutter speed. Even though the camera as on a tripod, it’s safe to either use software or a camera remote to fire the shutter. Or use the self-timer like here, setting it to five seconds, giving enough time for movement to cease.
03 Metering options
As there are some very bright highlights on the marbles from the lighting, one option was to use Highlight Metering to minimize them and then restore the shadows in post. This worked, but I found that I preferred center-weighted metering – which created larger hotspots but, when the focus of the camera was on the surface of the marble, the hotspots became more blurred.
04 Camera settings
In the end I used manual focus because the AF would pick out the reflections, rather than the surface of the marble. I used aperture priority mode so I could cycle through various apertures and upped the ISO to 200 just to lower the chances of camera shake, even with using the timer.
Aperture – How much depth of field do you get?
Well the answer to that on a 105mm macro lens is not very much. At the widest aperture, which worked out at something like f/4.8, there was only a few millimeters of depth of field. If you look at the example, it meant that the edges of the key marble were completely out of focus and the clear marbles in the background virtually disappeared.
A choice of f/11 produced more depth and made the background visible, but still not enough for an entire marble (which was about 10mm in size).
Before you go....
To shoot close ups like this you need a macro lens, some modern LED lighting and a decent tripod.
