Macro Me

As I mentioned before, I recently bought a new lens for my camera. One of the reasons I wanted a new lens was because I was getting bored with my camera and its normal lens that came with it (which, if you believe people that spend all their time posting on digital photography forums, isn't the best quality). So this new lens seems pretty nice and was reviewed pretty well for its price. So far I've been very happy with it. It has motivated me in a way because now when I look through my camera, I see a completely different world than I was used to with the old lens.

So I got all excited and I started reading a bunch of stuff on photography websites. One of the things you'll find if you spend a little time reading photography forums is there are some insanely talented photographers out there with unspeakably expensive equipment producing awe-inspiring photos. I don't know whether I am more inspired or discouraged by their work. I guess I'm usually inspired at first, but then when I sit down and look at my photos I get discouraged.

So anyway, as I was reading about all these other photographers, their equipment, and looking at their incredible photos and I started noticing and paying more attention to their macro shots. I've always thought macro photography was interesting, but I've never known anything about it. So I started reading and evaluating my options on what it would take (and cost) to experiment with macro photography. As it turns out, there is a relatively inexpensive lens attachment that can turn my 70-300mm telephoto lens (that I just bought and use for Rian's soccer games) into a lens suitable for macro photography. It's called the 500D and it just screws into the front of a lens like a filter.

Last weekend I placed a big order at adorama for the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, the 500D, a 4 gb CF card and a UV filter protector for my lens. The total was a lot, but was actually less than what I payed at Best Buy for just the lens -- including 3-day air shipping. The lesson here is don't buy expensive stuff at your local Best Buy or Circuit City or whatever. Find a good deal online at a reputable website and buy it there. I actually planned to do this all along, but I initially bought the lens at our local Best Buy to make sure that I liked it because it's a lot harder to return things that you buy online. I returned it last week a couple days before my order arrived.

On Friday my shipment arrived and I started taking a ton of really bad macro photos. Since then, I've been taking a bunch of horrible, out-of-focus, blurry photos of really small things: a dead beetle (not to be confused with a dead Beatle), a bunch of activity at the entrance to an anthill, Rian's toys, Lacey's eyes, and anything else I can find. It's actually a lot of fun if you can handle the disappointment of every single photo looking like crap. The fun part is getting up next to something and seeing it in a way that perhaps you've never seen it before.

Fortunately out of a few hundred I actually found two that I'm not embarrassed to share. The first is of a very small dragonfly eating something (it looked like he was eating, but I know nothing about dragonflies so he could have been doing something else) on one of our huge, larger-than-life, fire hazard tumbleweeds that are growing impossibly quickly in our backyard. The second is just a leaf that was growing on a tree in our backyard. It's not actually very interesting, but the remarkable thing is that it isn't horribly out of focus or blurry, so that's why I'm posting it.

This experiment with macro photography has gotten off to a disappointing start, but I think I'm learning and I'd like to think I am, or soon will begin to, very slowly start getting better. So look for more macro shots in the future. Hopefully next time I'll have something interesting to show you.

As always, comments are enabled and I'd love to hear what you have to say.