Hey guys! I’ve been playing around with my 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Lens and some picked wildflowers… I created some focus stacked images last post. I’m relearning old skills from years and years ago. I had a bit of hard time with the picked flowers because I just didn’t have a small enough container to hold them in.

After several days of trying to think of a solution, I realized that what I really wanted was a dollhouse-sized vase! So I found some really cute ones and ordered them…

As you can see the flowers have continued to age… but in some ways that is good, because one of the daisy-like flowers (California Brittlebush, far right) gained pollen. I had thought that it was past the pollen stage when it actually hadn’t started yet, so that’s cool. Also the little yellow flower from the grass (the one in the pink vase, Yellow Sweetclover) had some neat changes as well. The other two yellow flowers were not in the last post, but were also picked before I had the vases and aged and bloomed since being picked (especially the one on the far left).

I didn’t mean to pick all yellow flowers, but that’s what happened.

I also ordered a light box to help me out with lighting and bounce light… it came with a LED USB light attached and several interchangeable color backgrounds..

It also occurred to me that it’s really hard to tell how big things are in a photo without some kind of reference… so I put each vase up next to a ruler…

I kept accidentally having the flowers face-plant onto surfaces and losing pollen in the process, so I decided to use it to my advantage… Here you see the pollen on the black backdrop insert…

My 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Lens has a VERY narrow field of focus. Normally, the smaller the aperture the wider the field of focus… but I noticed that with this lens it really seems to just be that the contrast of blur is less as I closed the aperture.

I photographed the fallen pollen with the macro lens and changed the aperture from f/2.8 -> f/16.0 in one-stop increments (I added the red lines to indicate the field of focus)…

Even though it didn’t make much of a difference for focus, it seemed more pleasing at f/11.0, so I took photos at that aperture.

California Brittlebush:

I had a bit of fun getting closer, and closer, and closer to the center portion of the California Brittlebush (I should probably learn flower anatomy)…

Yellow Sweetclover:

I was able to really get to use the 5x portion of the lens with this little Yellow Sweetclover…

Brassica:

This little yellow plant grows really tall with little blooms, we picked two different ones, the blooms look similar but the stems were slightly different… one felt like a cut flower stem, while the other was like a thin branch…

Unfortunately, I don’t know what it is… but my phone (the Apple Visual Look Up that tries to identify plants, dog breeds, etc.) seems to think that it might be Brassica, which if I look closely, I can see tiny Brussels Sprouts-like blooms… soo cute…

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The 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Lens has a bit of a learning curve, and with the bright lights and the manual focus, my eyes got fatigued pretty quickly… so I didn’t get all 5 flowers in this photoshoot. I still have the little flowers slowly aging, I don’t know if I’ll do another photoshoot with them or go out and find different flowers later. But I had a fun time playing with the macro lens again.

Until next time…

~nic