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My fantastic wife bought me a Macro lens from Poon for christmas...I couldn't be more happy

I know I am doing a few things wrong.

Firstly, shooting mid day, but I was so excited there was no reasoning with me. Plus, the garden is full of these things when it is hot hot hot (read 44 degrees!)

Second, and probably the worst, dirty lens! Its now clean.

Third, I don't have a flash other than the onboard, and I am having trouble getting it to trigger when I want. However I am building a macro light to get around this.

There has been a bit of PP, cropping mainly.

So without further ado, here are the best 3 from nearly 500.








Havn't had such a fun time in years...Next is to go down to the local stream and see what I can find!

Great macros

What macro lens did your wife get you??

You certainly picked a difficult subject for your first macro shots. Despite that, you have done very well.

Your backgrounds are great. Backgrounds can be difficult in macro photography as you need something that is not distracting. Due to limited depth of field in macros, the background is usually out of focus, but can often have hot spots and other things to draw the viewers attention. The backgrounds here are perfect.

The first image is suffering from the harsh lighting and could probably have done with a bit more depth of field. What f/stop were you using?

The second image is excellent other than the hot spot on one of the eyes. You have a good level of detail on both the head and the front of the thorax. The legs have good detail, too.

The third is also very good but again that highlight on the eyes is distracting.

Unfortunately, shooting with sunlight is going to give you annoying highlights and I find flash works best - it also helps freeze the action and gives you some flexibility over the shutter speed to allow you some control over your backgrounds. An external flash, like the 580EX would help here, especially with a diffuser or softbox.

Anyway, well done.

A great start to the amazing field of macros. I do like the second one best.

Thanks for the comments

The first was shot at ISO 200, 1/200, f6.3.

The second and third at ISO 200, 1/400, f11.

Taken with a Sigma 150mm macro.

The background is my trusty green steel stratco fence, about 1.2m behind the subjects.

The wifey is currently being groomed for an external flash unit, but I don't know if I will get away with the 580ex!

Wonderful shots, gets me thinking more about the Canon 100mm macro that I need to buy some day!