New lens, new possibilities

Macro photography is one of the reasons I got myself a DSLR in the first place. There's just something so cool to look at the eyes of a spider or wings of a butterfly in extreme close-up. I thought this could be done on the cheap so I got myself a set of macro extension tubes. You can take macro pics with those, but man they're a handful. You need to fit the tube between the optics and the camera body and once there, you'll only be shooting macro. That is, if you fit the right size of tube for whatever lens you have on - for some lenses the focus point moves inside the objective when you fit a too long tube on making it impossible to focus on anything. When you can focus you normally can forget about AF as there's a fair bit of light lost in the tubes. Thus by the time you're ready with the equipment, the butterfly will have flown away and the spider died of old age.

So having tried the cheap way, I decided to try the expensive way next and got me a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM macro lens. Canon also makes a "non L" version of the same lens with the same aperture and focal length, which costs about half of the price of the "L" version. The more expensive version is weather-sealed, comes with a lens hood as standard and has slightly better optical performance. Most important difference is image stabilization for those moments when the butterfly refuses to come near your tripod. Both of these act as a normal 100mm prime lens with reasonably large (f/2.8) aperture, but can seamlessly also focus very close to offer macro level magnification. You need IS with long lenses, so it's a bit counter-intuitive why you'd need it for things that are close, but believe me it's the same thing.

The Canon IS system can compensate for camera movement (up/down, left/right) as well as camera tilt. What it can't fix is movement towards or away from the target, and this even at f/2.8 would definitely be needed as the focused distance is extremely short. You sway a bit towards the target or away from it and all you get is blur.

So I went for the whole enchilada and walked around the house yesterday with the new lens looking for things to shoot. You can see some samples around this post - I'm simply amazed at what kinds of pictures came out even on my first time test shoot. You can see all my macro photos here - the same set includes also the ones I took with the tubes early on so it's easy to compare.

The best part about this macro lens is that it's also a very good short telephoto objective. With a crop sensor it's a 160mm equivalent, but with f/2.8 aperture. My telephoto zoom lens can do no better than f/4 at that focal length and render less details. I can see myself walking around town with this lens attached to take building detail pictures as well as people action shots too. Canon does have a f/2.8 telephoto zoom but that's just too much - too pricey, too heavy and too large to carry around all the time. Finally, if I ever do switch to a full frame body, I now have at least one lens that won't be out of place. There's these rumours about Canon making a full frame enthusiast camera with lower pixel resolution and fantastic high ISO performance. If they do that I will be very tempted...