Right now I should be writing an entry about the birdwatching and photography trip I was planning to take today. Unfortunately I forgot to charge my camera so I ended up staying at home. Instead I went into the garden to use up the remaining battery life in my camera by taking some macro shots.
I wasn’t really expecting much in the way of usable results. Firstly I’m using some pretty old glass. The only macro lens I have that I can mount on my D-SLR is an old Tamron 52B. It’s a good quality lens but it’s manual focus and very difficult to use on my 450D, especially as I was using it with a 2x teleconverter and no focusing rails. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, I really don’t have an eye for macro photography. Even less so than for all other kinds of photography, which I’m frankly a rank amateur at.
Despite all of this I actually managed to get a couple of fairly decent photos by my standards. They’re really nothing to shout about but they’re at least fairly sharp and probably won’t make anyone’s eyes bleed too much. Out of 57 shots taken I managed to upload 8 to my Flickr account. most of the others were either focused incorrectly or duplicates. I took a lot more than I needed to because it’s really hard to judge the quality from the back of the camera, especially when you’re dealing with razor thin depth of field.
Here’s a selection of what I took. They’re all on my Flickr in higher resolutions.
As much as my own skill is lacking, I can’t fault the lens. For a 3rd party lens that was first manufactured in 1979 it’s really good quality, even disregarding its age it’s still a good lens. It cost me less than Canon’s current cheapest lenses and it really punches above its weight in both build and optical quality. It’s almost entirely metal and the focusing is very smooth and precise. Optically it’s very hard to find significant fault with it either. Here is a 100% crop from one of the photos I took today. It was taken at iso1600 so I could shoot at a fast enough shutter speed to be sure of arresting any camera shake or tiny movements of the fly.
The noise reduction kills a bit of detail, the 450D doesn’t have the most impressive high iso capability but it’s still a commendable performance from both camera and lens.
Maybe one day I’ll learn to compose a decent still life or interesting flower shot and be able to really make the most of this lens.
