How to take Nice Macro Photos with a Nikon CoolPix L26 16mp?

Question

I am an OOAK Doll artist, and I sell my work through Ebay. I need to be able to take nice looking macro pictures of my dolls so they will sell. I use a Macro Photo Box, and I have 2 cameras an old Kodak Easy Share 4mp and a newer Nikon CoolPix L26. I am not a photographer, but I still would like to take detailed pictures of my art. The dolls tend to be about 6 inches in height. Some are as small as 2 inches. Anyway, I really know nothing about taking pictures, but I wanted to know if anyone knows how to take pretty/nice pictures with what I have available to me.

Answer 1

So, macro is usually considered 1:1 so if you had a 35mm object it would fill the frame of a photo on 35mm film. What you have is large enough that you should be able to either zoom with the lens or just get closer (be careful to not use "digital zoom" which is really just magnifying an image by making pixels larger and discarding the edges. Only use optical zoom).

Then you want to think about composition (rule of thirds, empty space, etc) and off camera lighting. Assuming dolls are supposed to look human like you could probably use portrait techniques to generate interesting results.

If you have details that you want to show off, maybe a fancy button or the quality of some stitching, the texture of the face perhaps, that'd be macro. You wouldn't have anything else in the shot. In a macro shot of my dog's nose there is literally nothing but my dog's nose because that's all that'll fit in the picture at the macro scale.