Reacquaintance with a forgotten lens

It had been a very long time — quite possibly even more than a decade — since I had last used my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. It had been stored in the gear bag holding my backup DSLR, a Canon 7D, and that gear bag is stored on a shelf in an office closet.

The lens came to mind Friday as I perused dozens of flowers that Lee Ann and her daughter had brought home from a shopping trip earlier in the day. I wanted to do some new photography, and using the macro lens on my Canon 6D to photograph all these flowers struck me as an opportunity to do that.

The pictures you see in this post are a result of that endeavor. How did the shoot with a macro lens go after years of not using it? I’d say I had mixed results. My efforts to take multiple shots of the same bloom but using different points of focus worked out nicely in a few instances. In others, not so much.

For example, look at the pink flower leading off the post and the violet one above. I made points to take each one of these with two focuses -- the center (stamen) of the flower and the petals themselves. The one of the pink flower shows the latter focus, the violet one shows the former. Below are their immediate opposites.

But in general, I found I had to get reacclimated to the lens’s auto focus, which takes requires a few seconds to hunt when I switch subjects. That reminded me of a reason I may not have used it much in recent years, buy I got used to it again quickly.

Then I had to remember the sensitivity of the aperture when shooting closeup shots. I made a lot of shots, adjusting apertures along the way to perfect the object of various compositions. Above is an example of one of my bigger challenges. I tried to line up with the smaller, unopened blooms to be on the same plane as the main bloom so I would have sharp focus across the board. 

It was difficult to verify whether I had succeeded on the small (relatively speaking) LCD screen at the point of shoot. It wasn't until I got the image up in post-processing that I saw that I probably should have stopped down another stop or two to fully accomplish my objective. But this came pretty close.

Almost as challenging were the first two flowers below -- getting the patterns on the inside of the bloom to come in sharp. 

A lot of shots required me to get low to the ground because the flowers were still in their small pots or plastic containers, and I had nothing handy that was higher to move them to temporarily. Because of knee and other joint discomfort I was experiencing doing that, I found myself rushing and/or not making multiple shots in some situations … and suffering the consequences later in post-processing when I came across images in which the shutter speed had been too slow. (Unfortunately, this Sigma macro lens does not have OS [optical stabilization] to correct camera shake). So I tossed out a dozen or more shots because they were blurred due to shutter speeds that were too slow.

Still, I ended with enough “keepers” to justify doing this blog post. I hope you enjoyed these.