Tag: dragonfly

I pride myself in not having much in the way of conventional sense when it comes to photography.  I started very late in life and self-taught myself the little I know the hard way, by making an enormous number of mistakes.  So last summer I rented the Sony 100-400mm GM lens and in addition to taking shots of birds in trees and other obvious telephoto targets I tried my hand at using it as a macro lens.  Now it wasn’t really a macro.  Each of these photos is a massive crop from the original file.  But I wanted see if I could get the resolution and focus needed to take insect photos.  The answer is yes and no.  Yes in the sense that if you’ve got blazing sunlight you can shorten the exposure enough to make up for the difficulties of a long lens and monopod stability (or instability) without the ISO going too far up.  But no, in the fact that you can do the same and better with a 90mm f2.8 macro lens without having to stand in the next county.

The results are respectable and show that the lens is very sharp.  And I’ve become more appreciative of my macro lenses.  I’ll put up a second post later on the more conventional telephoto capabilities of this lens.