MY NEW TOY—

I did my best to stimulate the economy with Uncle Sam’s recent benevolence; while chipping in a few bucks of my own, of course.

I bought a new lens for my digital camera—a Canon 100 mm, F 2.8 Macro.

Macro defined means “Very large in scope” or some variation of that phrase. With this lens it means it is capable of making an image in the ratio of 1:1, or, the same size in the camera it is in real life.

It’s rather like walking around the woods with a magnifying glass attached to your camera.

Here’s a sample:

This critter appears to be a member of the “Fly” family/genus/species; whatever. Because the lens has a focal length of 100 mm (a modest telephoto) I can take very close-up appearing pictures without getting extremely close to the critter.

This “fly” sat quite peacefully for its portrait, which, incidentally, appears to give new meaning to the photographic term, “red eye”.

As you can plainly see the zone of sharp focus (depth of field) in this photo technique is very shallow. I got this composition fairly well adjusted then moved the camera very slightly back and forth until the plane of sharp focus fell squarely on the critter’s face, then, gently tripped the shutter.

I suspect you will be seeing more samples like this on the blog. In fact, my very first effort produced a rather delicious picture of a spider preparing its breakfast. That picture is in the queue—waiting for a specific identification from the local bug-ologists.

Please stay tuned.