Macro madness

Didn't want to overload Facebook with photo-nerdery - but here are a couple more in the "Tom stands in the garden with his zoom out" series.

As I said, used the Sigma 70-300@300 and in macro mode.

I've got a bank of settings designed for "sport" which is set up to use a limited auto-ISO mode (200-800), upping the ISO to keep the shutter speed above 1/200s.

Initially I tried using the autofocus, but the Sigma is just too slow and with a busy background and small subject, was ending up locking onto background objects too often. Had more success switching to manual focus - or towards the end, manually getting the focus plane pretty close to where it needed to be, then flicking to auto (continuous) to let it make the last adjustment and continue to adjust if I fired off multiple shots.

Looking back at the shots, both full manual and manual/auto focus approaches had about as many hits as misses.

As you'll see from the bigger sizes, even the "hits" are pretty soft, which shows up a) the lens and b) the difficulty with trying to get things in motion with a razor thin plane of focus! Light levels let me go up to f8, but even this, as you'll see, doesn't give any depth of field at all.

I've also had to crop in the finish photos from the wider shots (the 300 macro doesn't get that close), which hasn't helped quality.

General learning from the process:

Hoverflies are good - they tend to hang around the same bushes for several minutes at a time, there are lots of them and they stop and hover - as the name suggests!

Patience - like most photography it's more about the willingness to stand around and take 200 photos, then any particular talent!

Use both eyes - because the Sigmas macro mode locks you into 200-300mm, was having to find where flies were with eye away from the finder, then try to locate them in the finder while zoomed, which proved difficult at first, but with a bit of practice and keeping both eyes open you begin to get the knack of "seeing" the wide scene with one eye, the zoomed image with the other and somehow navigating your way round both to get the insect into the middle of the frame!

Insect backsides are fairly boring - and they're not very helpful and keep moving around, so I had to rotate around them quite a lot to get the more interesting views. Hoverflies again nice subjects as they didn't seem that bothered with me standing very close.