Sometimes, if you look closely, you will see something interesting that happens to be very small. Your normal lens may have a macro feature, but I prefer to use a lens designed just for that purpose. For my Canon t3i camera, I have the Canon EF-S 60mm f2.8 lens, which cost me about $600. Not everyone will want to lay out that much cash to take pictures of bugs and flowers, but that’s one of my favorite things to do so I felt that it was a good investment for me.

This spring, as soon as the wildflowers started blooming and the fruit trees started blossoming, I took a few shots in my backyard and a few more on a drive into the Hill Country.

This little cactus is about 10” tall and 3” across.

I’ve had it in a pot for several years, but this spring I put it in the ground and it immediately bloomed! It produced two pretty yellow flowers that lasted a week or so.

I have a small fig tree in a very large pot, and this year it is producing about 50 figs.

This photo is one of the little ones just developing, and now they are getting close to being ripe. If the bugs and birds don’t get them first, this will be a bumper crop from this little tree.

Two years ago I planted a Texas redbud tree just off my back porch, and it really busted out with flowers this spring.

You can see that my macro lens lets me get up really close, but the depth of field is not very deep. (Depth of field is the range from front to back that is in focus. With a macro lens at a low f-stop, you might see a depth of only about an inch). You can see in this photo that the blooms just a short distance behind the ones I’ve focused on quickly fall out of focus.

I took this picture near Fredericksburg, of a flower about the size of a golf ball.

I love the fact that you can see the collected pollen on the bee’s body. There is no way I could have gotten this picture with a normal lens.

Here’s another little flower about 2” in size.

This is a perfect example of a narrow depth of field. You can see that the tip of the bloom is slightly out of focus, as are the leaves at the back, with only the central part of the flower in focus. I don’t see that as a problem in this case because I think it still makes a lovely photo, perhaps more so than if everything were in focus. After all, it’s art, right?

featured, macro photography