It’s no secret – to my regular visitors at least – that I’m a big fan of macro photography. I first tried a macro lens in 2014 and immediately knew I loved it and that I had to get one. For my Canon, I had a 90 mm Tamron (as far as I remember) and when I bought my first mirrorless camera, I got an Olympus macro lens as soon as possible.
There are probably some people out there having snobbish attitudes about what is macro and what isn’t. To me, macro means closeup pics taken with a macro lens and that’s that. I enjoy it and whether I get super close or not (which I usually don’t), I enjoy it and often like the results.
You can get nice closeups with other lenses as long as they allow a wide enough aperture to create that nice blurred background, but I love the effects you get with a macro lens – a new world opens up to you and you discover details that you didn’t know existed because your eyes can’t see them.
Macro photography has made me overcome fear of spiders and instead I love them because they are beautiful and fascinating. And there’s a lot more to discover. For this year I planned to work on my macro skills, but it never happened because I’ve been so busy, and with the windy weather it was near impossible to shoot macro! Then I was inspired to try shooting subjects at the ground, which would be possible also with the wind, but I haven’t come anywhere with that. Next year, hopefully!
I was browsing my Lightroom library for some of my favourite macro shots… so here’s a little selection.






This is a set of hoverfly shots I did in 2020… probably the same hoverfly from different angles!


And of course there’s the insect on the olive in Italy that I showed you a while ago:

Some of these are very heavily cropped which you can see on the grainy background. What I’ll work on next is primarily to get closer so that I don’t need to crop so much. I’d also like to get a diffuser for my flash. I tried making one myself and managed to create something that worked but was a bit inconvenient.. so I think I’ll take myself to a certain photography gear shop in Cork to check out the “real” ones. Using a flash can dramatically improve the sharpness of macro photos but I’ll need to be able to adjust the quality of that light… this is something I’m going to indulge in when I’ve finished my graphic design course.
I hope you enjoyed my little creatures, and I wish you a lovely weekend.
Sharing with the folks at Natalie’s weekend coffee share.
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