The Girls Were Ready For Their Close-up

I finally did it! I finally rented a macro lens to checkout!

I waited for a weekend when my daughter would be home from school. She’s a photography hobbyist as well and I wanted to get a second opinion. I’m normally a portrait photographer and she is more into still life and nature.

I’m really glad she was here because I found that macro photography has a huge learning curve. She was having some of the same problems I was and it was great to compare notes.

My local camera shop only had one macro lens available to rent and that was a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM. One of the biggest problems we were both having with this lens was the lack of built in IS (image stabilization). The lens just couldn’t compensate for the hand movement, subject movement or breeze. The other major thing we needed to get use to was the unbelievably shallow depth of field. It was so shallow on f/2.8 that you could have a single hair on a bee in focus and the rest of her out of focus. The solution to this is to close down my aperture, but the down fall is less light resulting in under exposed photographs. We played with aperture settings and shutter speed and started to get the hang of things before we had to return the lens. I think we both agreed that spending a little extra and upgrading to the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro would be well worth the price.

Now I just need to save up some money!

Enjoy the pictures we took below. We were trading off so much I can’t tell you for sure which ones my daughter took vs. which ones I took.

All the photos were taken using my Canon EOS 5D Mark ii (the new version of this camera is the 5D Mark iii) and the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens.