A fly

I’ve now owned my Tamron 90mm macro lens for a few weeks, and yet hardly used it. Today I walked to some local woodland and crawled around for half an hour taking photos of insects.

It’s quite hard to hold the camera still enough, and you need a lot of light. You need to keep the shutter short enough that the movement of your hands doesn’t blur the photo (let alone movement of the insect), but at the same time you need to keep the aperture small enough that the depth of field is deep enough to have the whole insect in focus. To counter this, you can increase the ISO speed but this can lead to otherwise poor quality photos.

In the shade of the woodland, there simply wasn’t enough available light for this kind of photography, and I left my macro flash at home. In the areas where there were clearings and strong sunlight, there was enough light for the photography but some of the highlights were burnt out (as in my example).