Bugs

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:

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. 

Wasp

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!