How did that pic get to be so white? Did you use flash? If so, here's my tip of the day. In general, NEVER use flash on macros. If you have a fancy remote flash that you can bounce off the ceiling or something to diffuse it, then fine. If it's just a garden variety point-and-shoot camera, disable the flash while shooting macros. Use daylight or artificial, but lots of it, because these little cameras have little lenses. They don't gather much light. Your light should be diffused and non glarey and from all directions to prevent sharp shadows
Use the tightest aperture (biggest F number) you can (AV Priority), to get decent depth of field. This means you gather less light (smaller aperture) so you have to pour the light to it.
Depth of field means that nearer parts and farther away parts of your photo will both be in focus. Shallow DOF (large aperture = small F number) means that your focus range might be as narrow as 1/2". Everything else is out of focus. But you need less light because of the bigger aperture. Deep DOF (small aperture = large F number) means that your focus range will be much larger. But you need more light because of the smaller aperture. (Aperture is the size of hole the light goes thru inside the lens to get to the film (or sensor, in digi cams)).
Using a smaller aperture (bigger F number) to get good DOF also means that, unless you can provide a LOT of light, you need to use longer exposures. That means using a tripod and the timer (unless you have a remote shutter release) to prevent your finger pushing the button from shaking the camera.
Digital cameras sort of emulate film by providing you with a range of ISO's. Depending on your camera, you might get away with as high as 200 - 400 (I stay down at 50 - 100), but the higher you go, the more noise. The pics get more grainy and crappy. Keep the ISO as low as possible. If your camera has auto-ISO, disable it for technical shooting. It's fine for pics of the fam damily outdoors, but not for tech shoots. This again means you need more light. Higher ISO films are "faster" and need less light. But their photo quality is lower.
And last, but not least, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL CAMERAS is how to manage White Balance. Before you shoot any photo, put a piece of pure white paper or card stock where your target is going to be, and at the same angle, and custom set your white balance. Don't rely on auto white balance (AWB). The presets are sort of ok sometimes, but not very accurate.
Different shots at different angles, different times of day, different kinds of artificial and natural light, etc., all can strongly affect where your white balance should be set. For fun, custom adjust it to crazy colors, effectively telling the camera that green is white or blue is white or whatever.
If you don't set white balance correctly you'll spend lots of time in Photoshop or Gimp color correcting your photos. I color correct probably 90% of my pics anyway, at least a little, even with good white balance. That's another article. It's real easy to color correct with those tools, but the technique isn't obvious if you haven't done it before. The auto-color-correct filters in those programs DO NOT WORK. They might do an acceptable job on 1 out of 1000 photos, if you're lucky. You must do it manually.
For macro shooting, a dirt cheap homebuilt light box (or light tent) is a perfect cure for a lot of the above problems. They're very simple to make. Here's some links:
Light Box / Light Tent Photo Gallery by Bill Huber at pbase.com
**broken link removed**
**broken link removed**
End of lesson 1