As I said previously, I find macro photographs of insects very interesting, these creatures have so much more to them than we realise. So when a fly happened to land on my curtains one day while my macro lens was attached I took a few snaps - these were all hand held and the fly was constantly moving so I had little chance to do much in the way of focusing but the result was an interesting first attempt:
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| House fly |
I then went on holiday to Portugal for a fortnight and whilst there I found lots of opportunities to snap pictures of a variety of insects. One of the biggest problems I faced was the fact that these critters simply would not keep still. Even using the autofocus and snapping away I struggled, particularly with the ants which ran about like wildfire!
I did get a few interesting pictures though. The first is of a wasp which happily sat still for a while and I was able to play with the depth of focus a bit to produce this result. I also managed to get this one decent picture of a soldier ant, though it's head is a little out of focus - I spent ages trying to capture pictures of ants, they were constantly running around transporting things but with their speed I really struggled.
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| Wasp |
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| Soldier ant |
Another macro insect picture to add to the list, this grasshopper landed on our living room window and stayed put for a while - though it kept moving around to get away from my lens and was a little too high up making it awkward to do a great deal of focusing, I still managed to get a few shots showing the finer detail of it's body.
If you compare that to a picture I had taken some months ago of a grasshopper using my standard SEL-1855 lens you can see a clear difference:
I'm not 100% sure on the best approach going forwards, bugs which don't move (or not much) are the ideal subjects, but also I think I need to have a little play with my camera so I can have exactly the right mode set up ready when I am using the macro lens in order to get the best results!
Around this time I started investigating macro lenses further - it was something I had always been interested in and I find macro pictures of insects particularly interesting. What, to the normal naked eye, appears quite a mundane creature, is generally something amazing when you look close up - insects are so rife on our planet and yet they can look so alien - even the ones we see every day!
So after much investigation and a little advice from a friend I decided on the Sony SEL30M35 E-mount lens specifically made for the NEX range of cameras. I am concious of buying lots of E-mount lenses because ultimately one day I will probably upgrade my camera to a full DSLR and if I have lots of E-mounts they will become useless (well possibly an adaptor could be purchased) wheras if I opt for A-mount at least if my upgrade is to a Sony DSLR I could still use my lenses. However, the SEL30M35 seems like such a great option for it's price that I couldn't resist. After watching several lenses on Ebay for a while I rapidly concluded that it wasn't worth spending the prices they were reaching when I could purchase new from WEX Photographic for not a huge amount more (including the Sony promotional £30 cashback).
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| Sony SEL30M35 |
So I placed my order for the lens and shortly afterwards it arrived.
My first impressions are that it is a good quality lens, though it does feel a lot lighter than the other A-mount lenses I have, I put this down to the size of the lens however meaning less glass therefore less weight. Just to be clear, the external dimensions of the lens are not much smaller than the standard SEL1855 lens, but the lens glass itself is tiny by comparison.
The first thing I did was to set off around the house with the lens attached, looking for things to take pictures of in close detail. The results were less than impressive, some things just don't look any more impressive close up! After a couple of hours doing this I decided I needed to take more specific pictures and selected a number of shells to take pictures of. Again, the results didn't exactly blow me away - I needed a project!
I decided to combine my photography with another of my passions (mountain biking) and having recently purchased a new bike I thought this would be ideal to take pictures of, blow up some of the detailing of the bike that is normally overlooked. The results were a great set of pictures showing various parts of the equipment - the full set are here: Flickr.com but some of my favourites are below:
I was very pleased with the pictures, though in hindsight realised that half of these were not exactly macro shots and could have been taken with my regular lens, but it shows that you produce much better photography if you have a project to direct & drive you - it was another reflection of the great pictures which we had produced during our February photography project as a direct result of focus!
