I dunno what to call it, a bee or a wasp! Whatever it is, I've been trying hard to take decent macro pics for a while now and this is the closest I could go even with the new 180mm EF-L life size macro lens :(

First thing I learned is that macro photography is not about shooting with the lens wide open! I've been obsessed with blurred background for a while and my default choice was always a wide open lens (f/3.5 with the 180mm). Now, the DOF available for a life size macro pic at this 'f' is minimal. While, shallow DOF can give u gr8 effects sometime, most times it is not what u want. So, the obvious choice would be to try with narrower shutters, like say f/5.6 or even f/8. But, the problem here is that, at life size, even a small movement of the hand will look like an earthquake in the frame!

So, u r left with two choices, using the flash (external better quality flashes - defenitely not the pop-up - if u want natural looking pictures) or using a tripod. If u cant use either, even higher ISO is an option.

In this particular case, I had bright sunlight available, which is good and bad (bad, coz of the shadows) and once (for the 3rd pic), I used ISO-800. 3rd pic also is the closest with a higher DFO (f/8 and a good 1/800s) compared to the rest at ISO-100 and f/5.6. Anyways, after downloading the pics to the computer, I knew they cud've been better :(

This is a trial of the 180mm EF-L lens on some garden flowers!

The 1st set of flowers are taken from a garden in a road side dhaba. All pics in Av mode, with five of them @ f/3.5 and three (bottom 3rd from left, bottom right and top right) @ f/5.6.

Pic of the red spongy flower is again @ f/3.5 in Av mode.

I believe I have a lot more collection of colors in the 3rd set and a few honey bees for variety :-) Here, its again Av mode, mostly f/3.5 and f/5 for only two (top left and bottom 3rd from left).

Some macro pics, from a trek to Pakshipathalam in Brahmagiri ranges, taken with the 180 macro EF-L lens.

The first pic is of an insect which has this unique talent of walking in the water! Am not sure what its really called, but let me call it a floater! The pic is taken @ Av mode f/3.5, the widest I can have. In hindsight, I didnt get the whole creature focused and a thinner aperture may have made sense. On the other side, 1/50s with that heavy lens is already bordering on a shaky picture :(

For the second pic, I actually wanted the edge of the leaves to go blurry and f/3.5 was an obvious choice, though I had enough light to play with. For the 3rd and 4th pics, I chose f/8 and still had decent light for 1/100s and 1/500s each.

Couple of macro pics during a trek to the Kudremukh peak:

These are some macro shots taken during a Thadiyandamol Trek:

This was my first real chance of using the new EOS 400D and I did click at every flower I could spot and followed every bee I saw. Couple of pictures I got were decent, but the majority were sufferring from a low Depth of Focus (DOF). I soon realized that keeping the lens wide open @ f/2.5 may not be the right thing to do in every situations.

Still, I had got a few decent pics, more because of luck than my understanding of the situation :-) In the first pic of the yellow flower, there are some portions which went un-focused. But, I liked the pic in spite of that :-) I am still not sure if I would have got a better pic with a different 'f' value, but I should have atleast tried!

In the second pic, the white flower had a kind of wierd shape and the pic is taken at a rather flat angle. Hence, the DOF was not much of a problem here.

The real problem in this pic was the exposure. I should have got a better pic, had I used a lower exposure time. But, the problem was that I was already using the lowest possible in my camera (1/4000s). Now, it didnt occur to me that I could just reduce the shutter width to something like f/4.5 and darkening out the background. It would have been an easy thing to do, coz my subject was a bright white fower.

In the third pic, the subject is not the flower, but the bee and again, since the bee is only a small portion in the frame, it is reasonably focused, except for the edge of its wings. The flower is hardly focused in this pic, but it didnt matter much!

All these cases, I guess I should have atleast have tried with a few other exposure values. I may not have got any better results .... but atleast I would know what is the right thing to do.

The 50mm macro lens I have is no match to the super macro mode in Canon Powershot S2IS. But I did figure out a way, albeit a difficult one, to take macro pics. Jamshy first told me about this and send me some sites as well talking about Reverse Lens photography.

Concept is quite simple, just take a wide angle lens (I was using the 18-55mm EF-S lens with the lowest focal length) and use it with its front facing the camera. Now, its a tough thing to hold the camera and the lens together and do things like focusing, especially with the extremely low Dept of Focus (DOF) available while doing this.

The strands of the carpet in the picture is not more than a couple of mm wide. Also, the details visible through the reversed lens was hardly visible through naked eye! One obvious problem as can be seen in the pic is the extremely low DOF coz of which one has to be extremely careful about focusing. Ofcourse, the focusing has to be manual with the lens detached.

There is quite a lot of literature in the net, talking about reversed lens photography, one of them even talking about how to make a ring to hold this lens. Looks like this kind of rings are even available in the market!

These pics are during a trek to Kodachadri ... using the same Super Macro mode of Canon Powershot S2IS:

Super Macro mode in my Canon Powershot S2IS was discovered accidentally during a trek to the Mullayanagiri peak. It gets activated when the macro button is pushed down for a longer time. I realized that the camera is in Super Macro mode when I found it difficult to focus far away objects.

I cannot describe how capable is the super macro mode in this camera. It allows u to go to almost zero distance from the object and take life size pics. See the pics below for sample:

These two pics is what really showed me what Depth of Focus (DOF) is, as well as how to control it.

Though, the background blurring is a reasonably difficult job using the S2IS, it was possible by choosing a background as far as possible and varying the angles. I took a set of pictures of this rose flower using different 'f' values in my S2IS.

The first pic, at f/3.5 has the background considerably blurred. Background gets clearer with lower values of shutter width, culminating @ the 2nd pic with a f/8 settings.

WIKI has some articles regarding the DOF variation with different values of exposure width. The basic principle is something like this:

In theroy, optics has no concept of Depth of Focus ... or Depth of Focus (DOF) is zero. That means, focusing would have been possible only at a fixed distance from the camera. Then how are we even able to even take the photo of a flower, which has a finite width? The answer lies in the non-zero width of the censor pixels as well as the in-capability of our eye to distinguish two dots very close to each other. Hence, the fact that a small amount of blurring will go un-noticed with real-life censors and human eye.

Now, I am not trying to look at mathematical calculations and trying to figure out how small is 'a small amount of blurring'? But, what matters is that when the shutter is opened wider, the spread of light coming in is also wide, resulting in blurring even at small distance from focal length. Hence, Depth of Focus is smaller with a higher exposure width.