Macro Photography in Bulgaria

Join me and a local area specialist for a week of macro photography, focusing on the microcosmos world in wildlife rich Bulgaria!

If you love to see the natural world close up, in all its amazing detail this is the ideal holiday for you! The mountains, lakes, rivers and meadows of Bulgaria are the perfect place – full of butterflies, bugs and beautiful flowers, for a feast of macro photography!

The holiday has been designed to maximise the opportunities for macro photography, covering a wide range of different habitats and an equally wide range of photographic subjects.

There can be dragonflies and tree frogs close to the water, orchids and other flowers in the hillside meadows, along with a beautiful palette of colourful butterflies – which we will spend a fair amount of time on. And everywhere we go there is the chance to find other fascinating insects and other invertebrates, like praying mantids, longhorn beetles, katylids, spiders and much more.

I will offer advice and suggestions on how to capture intimate and interesting portraits of butterflies, spiders, insects and other invertebrates in their natural habitats. The kind of techniques that will be covered include: basics of macro photography; handheld stacking; working with natural light and tools to help optimise it; working with off-camera flash; composing your macro shots and digital workflow with Photoshop (you will need to bring your own laptop with software if you want help and advice on digital workflows). We will also have local expert naturalists with us for the duration of the entire tour.

We’ll stay in two areas, starting with 3 nights in the small town of Dragoman, northwest of Sofia. From our base we’ll head out to explore local marshes, meadows, mountains and rivers. We should find a plentiful supply of photo subjects, including numerous butterfly and dragonfly species. On the fourth day we’ll head south to the Gotse Delchev area via Kresna Gorge, to stay at the lovely Belite Skali Eco Hotel complex for the remaining four nights of the tour. We’ll spend more time in the mountains and will also benefit from having an expert herpetologist with us for 2 of the days, helping to add a nice range of reptiles and amphibians to the list of subjects we’ll see!

Our daily schedule is kept flexible as we’ll want to take account and full advantage of the local conditions, which can be changeable due to weather, altitude and so on. We will however be intending to run numerous early morning and evening sessions, to take advantage of some great light and the fact that a lot of our macro subjects will be less active and thus easier to photograph and practice certain techniques, i.e. stacking.

The potential species to photograph is almost endless and there are always new discoveries made on each trip, but we have added a selection of species to the itinerary that we have a good chance to encounter.

If you need any further information either contact me via the contact section of the website or go to the page on the Greenwings website by clicking here.

The below are examples of images that I have taken in Bulgaria at a similar time of year. Please note these images where taken in 2014 and my macro technique has changed a lot since then!