So I’m finally back in Dallas for a bit after a pretty rough month on the road. As part of a recent initiative, I’m trying to drop some weight (I seem to find weight that other people lose). In addition to CrossFit and cleaning up my diet I also bought one of those activity tracker watch thingies, which means I’ve been going on lots of random little walks to make sure I get in all 10,000 steps/day.
Every once in a while I’ll take my camera if I’m walking around a place where I think there will be flowers or other interesting things to photograph. Something I’ve been getting into more and more lately is macro photography. I own the Sony 90mm FE macro lens, which is one of my favorites for portraits, but only recently I’ve started actually using it to shoot close up images.
Well that was a long explanation…I found a pretty flower that had a bunch of miniature blooms on it so I took a picture of it for this week’s Picture of the Week!
Lots of Pretty Flowers
For the photographers: I didn’t really do too much on this one. I had the macro lens on my Sony a6300 (effectively making it a 144mm macro lens due to the APS-C sensor). ISO was 100, aperture was 2.8 (I wish this would’ve been a little more closed) and the exposure time ended up being 1/60s. I processed the image entirely in Lightroom with some minor levels adjustments and then it was ready to go!
There is nothing like a macro lens to get a striking variation of depth of field which strengthens the focus of the subject, Andy.
I use my trusty macro lens in some of the photography in the articles which I write — such as this one, where all of the photographs were taken with a macro lens…
http://thegate.boardingarea.com/stupid-tip-of-the-day-enjoy-the-simple-things-in-life/
…and sometimes I will use a telephoto lens as though it were a macro lens — such as the first two photographs in this article…
http://thegate.boardingarea.com/cherry-blossoms-bloom-in-washington-a-photographic-essay/
The drawback to a macro lens is that the subject needs to be perfectly in focus in order for the photograph to be exceptional — and that is not always easy to do.
As a completely different thought, I could use a wider wide-angle lens, which I hope to add to my arsenal sometime in the future…