Nature Photography

While out with my new lens today, I stopped to get a couple of photos of some beautiful thistle in full bloom. For as ugly and painful as thistles get in late summer and fall, in my opinion they do have one of the most beautiful flowers. The ones I found today were quite large, over two inches in diameter, some maybe over three inches. The vibrant clusters of purple glow vibrantly in the sunlight, too…attracting hoards of insects for pollination. There were at least half a dozen varieties of fly, two types of bee, lady bugs, and some kind of insect I couldn’t identify. Some of the flys had these amazingly patterned and iridescent eyes…one of which seemed to like the upper knob on my gimbal as a perch. He seemed to follow me around, as every time I looked at the knob…there he was, keeping a close compound eye on me. 😉

Every time I do something with this lens…things I’ve done before, with a number of other telephoto lenses, but new for this lens…I am simply blown away by its sharpness. A closer crop of the photo with the bee is shown below:

Unbelievable sharpness. I think I might be able to get somewhat close to that kind of sharpness with my dedicated 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, but even that, only inches away, has never seemed quite so sharp. For all of these photos, I was at least 20 feet away…and the sharpness is still amazing. A 100% crop is below:

You can even see fine detail on the bee! Well, as my third most expensive purchase ever (including my house), I have no doubt that this lens will offer as much return on it’s value as my car…which gets use almost every day. Can’t wait to get some good light, some good birds, and really see what she can do. Guess that will have to wait until fall, though…only a few Snowy Egret were around today, and the lighting was pretty harsh (photos coming soon…and despite the lighting, still better than most of my previous work with the 100-400.)