Home for the Summer

Since my last post I have not had many opportunities to get out and photograph anything.  Partly due to me being away at college.  Now summer is finally here and I am home, where there are many more opportunities to photograph wildlife and nature.  A couple days last week I was messing around with the Reverse Lens Technique trying to photograph flowers.  I mounted my 55 mm lens in reverse, using my reversing ring and mounted that on a stack of Kenko extension tubes.  I was surprised by the results.  With a regular mounted lens the extension tubes would allow you to be able to focus on closer subjects to the lens.  With the reverse lens mount on extension tubes, I found that it lets you stay further away from the subject which in some cases will be very nice.  I was happy about this because with just the lens you sometimes would be right on top of the subject in order for it to focus, but with the set of extension tubes it allowed me to be a little further away from the subject.  Hopefully this will help a lot when photographing insects, where as before it was a challenge to focus on animals because you had to get so close.  I also stumbled across either a ribbon or garter snake not sure which, when I was experimenting.  So I took a few shots with the normal mounted lens as well.  I have not had a chance to upload the images to my computer yet, but hopefully I will get to it this week and post some of the images by the end of the week.  Until next time.     

Garden Flowers

Here are a couple of images that I took of flowers in my garden.  I was testing my fathers new 90mm Macro lens.  He was having problems with it focusing but I had no problems.  I'm not sure why his camera would not auto focus with it.

I have not been able to get out to any wildlife areas in a while.  So I have been relying on things much closer to home.  I am also working on making a blind for bird photography.  As well as setting up a place to get woodland bird photographs in my back yard near the woods.  Also I was outside the other day and noticed that we have a rabbit that is eating out of our garden.  So I'm hoping that I can get photographs of him.  But no luck yet.

Macro Shots

Here are the macro photographs that I took last week.  I was really just testing my fathers set of kenko extension tubes with my 55-250mm lens.  It seemed to work very well.  But I just would like to get even closer.  It was good that I could stand at a distance away so I did not spook anything, but it was about a 1 to 1 ratio, and I just would like to get really close to the subject.  Macro photographs of insects are amazing and I would just like to get one great shot.  The bee photograph came out pretty good.  I think the color is what made it stand out to me.  Plus I noticed the different color in the bees eyes and thought that was cool.

I also photographed some of the flowers out in the garden outside.  This shot seemed to be the best.  I liked the crisp focus and then the soft blur towards the middle.  I am on the verge of buying some new equipment.  I know I'm going to get a reversing ring, plus a shutter release cable, but I'm also looking into getting a set of extension tubes or a bellows.  I'm hoping to order them this week.  Please let me know what you think of these photographs, and let me know about any macro equipment that you would recommend.