Up close and personal in the garden

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of macro work. It’s been part circustances and part choice. I’d love to get out and do some landscapes, or get started on some home studio stuff but circumstances (mainly health) mean I can’t right now. I’m so glad I got those Kenko extension tubes last year. I think I only paid about £15 on ebay for them. They’ve been worth their weight in gold. It’s so frustrating when you can’t focus close enough to something and these get you right up close!

I couldn’t afford a macro lens at the time so I firstly used the kenko tubes with the nifty fifty (50mm 1.8 mk II) but I soon found out that the extra reach and the Image Stabalisation of the 28-135mm IS made that lens a better match with the tubes. Since then I’ve used the tubes with the 70-300mm IS which has been a touch better still.
The big main limiting factor with the tubes is the shallow depth of field. If your using a tripod and your subject is stationary then you can stop down the lens or even take multiple exposures each one focused on a different area of the subject and piece them together later. Even with a small aperture though the DOF is still pretty shallow and tripod use isn’t always conducive to what your photographing. Due to the light fall off from using the tubes you simply have to use the lens wide open. If your lens is a bit soft wide open you will really notice this more so in macro work. High ISO use is another unfortunate trade off.

So the garden… As I’ve not been able to get out much I’ve been scouring the garden for something interesting to photograph. It’s not a pretty garden, nor big but when you start looking at it from a macro point of view it’s like a whole new world. After a while you start to notice things you never normally see.

I’ve already put a few deviations up from my recent macro shooting..



..but I’m mindful of putting too much macro stuff up. For one thing I’d like to keep my dA varied and also macro isn’t everybodies cup of tea. Generally it’s just not as pretty as say a nice sunset or an emotive portrait. So I think I’d like the next thing I dA to be something else, ideally a landscape but I’ve done the reservoir and hollingworth lake a few times now and plus I don’t really have a landscape lens at the moment either.
So anyway, as I don’t want to bombard everyone with macro in the gallery I thought I’d stick them in a journal entry. That’s also why I’ve stuck them all as scraps, it’s simply so I can link them to this entry. I haven’t done this before so I’m hoping they won’t show up in the main listings.



Yesterday I finally got my Macro lens. It’s the Canon EF-100mm Macro f/2.8. Like I said before I’ve wanted it when I got the tubes but couldn’t afford it. This is my first shot with my new 100mm macro lens



I can’t wait to give it a good go!

One thing that struck me immediately using the macro lens is that I can’t get as close as I could with the tubes. Having been using the extension tubes I’d gotten used to having to get right up close to the subject. Whereas the minimum focus distance on the 100mm macro is 31cm. Of course if I stick the tubes on this lens I’ll be getting just as close as before with even more extreme magnification – ooooh yeahhhh!

I did do some macro stuff last year too but it was much more interspersed between other stuff. Most of this stuff is the kenko tubes & the 28-135mm IS. Some of last years..



It’s turned into quite a long entry. I’m hoping all the links and the CSS style thingy worked, I wont know til I’ve put it up!

Bye for now