I’m sure every macro photographer has those days when they come home from a few hours of shooting to find that they are very unhappy with the success of the shoot.

The subjects in your photos just don’t look like they did when you viewed them in the field. You may only have one or two good images and the rest gets deleted.

One or two solid images from a session of macro photography is a success.

The fact is that the success rate for macro on a few hour shoot is very low. I’ve gone weeks with a lot of zero image counts.

When we view our subjects in the field we see them in 3D, and sometimes those subject do not translate well when we see them on flat screen monitor or print. So this is part of the problem we face as like I said, in the field it looks great and back home on the monitor not so great.

If you are just starting out as a macro photographer, your success rate will be higher as you are just starting to build your macro portfolio. But as time goes by and you progress and your portfolio grows and grows and you become a better macro photographer, you will start to find yourself becoming a little pickier about what gets kept and what gets deleted.

Now you are trying to top what you have done before, and the success rate starts to drop.

If I come home from a shoot and end up with four or five outstanding images, that’s a rare day.

So don’t feel down on yourself if you have spent all day shooting with nothing to show for it, don’t feel you are a failure, sometimes that’s just how it work in nature photography.

I understand this and accept it.