Big Eyes

A little while ago I became keenly aware of how fantastic Macro photography can make the world, after stumbling upon Michael doe1’s Flickr photostream. After spending a good section of the day looking at his amazing images, I knew that my next lens had to be a macro. If you haven’t already seen his work, head on over to his photo stream to see just how beautiful spiders (and other small creatures) can be.

 

Unfortunately, I don’t have really beautiful spiders hanging around and the excitement of getting the lens (which was a wonderful birthday present given to me by my wife) was too much for me to wait for the weekend, so I headed off into the (photo) “nursery”, our garden in Johannesburg South Africa, to put the lens to the test, photographing bees and flies, and anything else that would pose for the time I needed to get the shot. Strangely, flies… with their huge eyes make for (in my opinion) a really interesting photo… and that I guess is the real appeal of macro photography, the change in size shows just how interesting and beautiful our world really is.

 

Getting a reasonable macro shot was a little more difficult that I thought it would be. I found that you have to hunt for the shot, tend to hang around for a long time, waiting... and the slightest movement has a big impact on the quality of the image. Whilst I foresee many a practice hour required to get the art right, I was happy with a few of the images. This one, with its big eyes, was one of my favourites for the day.

Done