Its been a while since I did any photography when I am not travelling. A beautiful evening and some free time in the office changed it!

I am guilty of not making good use of my macro lens - Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L. I have used it more for portraits and less for macros. Now, with the rain tree (Samanea Saman) next to our office terrace in full bloom, the lighting just about perfect and a tripod in my possession, it was time to try out the life size macro.

I mounted the macro lens on the Manfrotto 728B Digi tripod and used the manual mode. The best aperture width for this lens is around f/7.1 and it made sense for this shot as well. Even though, I had a tripod, it was slightly breezy and I had to choose a shutter speed of atleast 1/100s to avoid the blur. This meant that the ISO had to be kept at ISO-400.

This is also the time I realized that my camera (EOS 400D) is quite outdated. On trying out Amit's EOS 500D, I saw the benefits of upgrading - better ISO, a very bright display and amazing features like live preview. In his camera, I could go for a 10x zoom on the live preview and focus precisely on what I wanted. Anyways, the pic here is taken with my old EOS 400D after a few attempts to get the focus right. The aim was to get the pollens at the bottom in focus and get some bokeh for the ones at the top. Guess, I somehow managed that :)