Can Macro Lenses be Used for Normal Photography in 2023?

If you are here, then you are either obsessed with macro lenses and macro photography or just wanna know whether you can do normal photography with macro lenses or not. I have researched about macro lenses and their photography and finalized my results.

Can Macro Lenses be Used for Normal Photography?

Yes, Macro lenses are well optimized and enhanced for macro photography, but you can also do normal photography like landscape and portrait photography with professional techniques and may get excellent results too.

Why Shooting with Macro Lenses?

So, my favorite portrait lens is actually the Sony 90mm macro lens which should. Should you use a macro lens for portraits? This is one of my best-kept secrets in all of photography and cinematography. I love these things and I feel that every single person that is interested in photography and videography should own a macro lens.

Biggest Misconception About Macro Lens

So, the biggest misconception about macro lenses is exactly that, the name, macro. You just think, oh I don’t really do macro photography, it doesn’t really interest me that I should shoot flowers really close up, etc. It’s just not my jam.

But that’s what I feel most people just dismiss them. Yeah, macro lenses are amazing for macro shots, but you can use them for so much more. But going back to macro, if you haven’t played around with shooting macro, it’s fascinating.

I think it’s something that every photographer should play with and mess around with. If you never shot a snowflake with a macro lens, oh! you are missing out. So, being able to explore a new avenue of this craft that you are so interested in, is amazing and this lens will do that for you.

And not just that I use the macro lens for everything. It is literally the Swiss Army knife in my camera bag when it comes to shooting anything. That entire pizza-making sequence you saw Denis and Peter McKinnon shot some while ago, that whole thing was done with a macro lens.

Types of Photography with a Macro Lens

With a macro lens, you can shoot close up, you can get far away. It’s got great depth of field because the focal length is 100mm, so it’s got a great compression, making that nice blurry background with a sharp foreground. The fact that this is stabilized, makes the shots even smoother, so I can shoot a lot more hand-handled, which is amazing.

Portraits

The macro lens is also great for portraits. You’ve got macro capabilities, you’ve got portraits. You can shoot great B-Roll and great video using these lenses. You can get super close up on someone’s eye and the best thing is that these lenses are pretty much stabilized.

These lenses cost about 800 bucks on Amazon. If you don’t wanna spend that much money, you can also get the non-L version, the EF version which is about half of that cost (400 bucks). This lens is a beast in its own world.

The YouTuber Peter McKinnon worked for a company for about seven years doing shots of playing cards and product photography and used this lens for about 95% of those images and they looked incredible. So, don’t think that just because it is called a macro lens, it can only be used for macro-like photography.

Landscape Photography

You can do really amazing landscape photography with a macro lens. Here you would ask me that let alone macro lens we don’t even use prime lenses for landscape photography. All you have heard till now is that you have to do landscape photography with a wide-angle or an ultra-wide-angle lens.

Okay! Then what about a telephoto lens? You do get compression in a telephoto lens. The same is with a macro lens. You will get a closer look at the scenes, or you will have to step back. Also, if you are far away and you want a closer and more detailed photo of something, like a mountain peak or a lake, a macro lens can do that for you very easily.

Macro Photography

As suggested by the name, the more precise use of macro lenses is that the macro photography. You can have incredible macro shots of flowers, bugs, and bees sitting on the flowers. The closer photos taken with a macro lens are clearer, detailed, and crisper than a normally zoomed lens.

Conclusion

And that’s it for me today, so I hope you enjoyed this post and hope you got something out of it, learned something new. I hope that now it’s clear to you that just because of its name, you won’t limit the macro lens for just macro photographers and try one yourself too for any type of photography whether macro, portraits, landscape or close-up videos.

For more info, you can check out this forum to clear your doubts.

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