Its a small world after all, a bugs life, new to macro and loving it with the Olympus 60mm macro
Full screen gallery below
The last time I did macro or even owned a proper macro lens is now 10 years ago probably. It never really stuck with me. I don’t know why, but I rather did landscape photography. These days I am more about nature and wildlife photography, especially birds. So my interest in macro got sparked again with the Olympus M.Zuiko 300mm PRO lens that has some “macro” capabilities. So when seeing a good second hand deal on an Olympus M.Zuiko 60mm macro lens I jumped on it.
So my first outing was just to test and see how hard it actually was to do macro in a 1:1 scenario. It is hard, but doable I guess. I just search my garden and the street outside of my house twice and was amazed on what you can find. That is the cool thing with macro, you don’t need to hike for hours. So my first shot was a really really small spider.
This one was easy, at it was still for most of the time. Still the depth of field is so small it really needs a steady hand and some high iso. I always knew that for proper macro photography you need a flash. Moving on to the next plants I got the classic ladybug photo. I love it! The colours always pop when having that green, red and black combined.
Moving on to other parts of green here in the neighbourhood I stumbled upon a few insects covered in pollen. I guess they feed on these pollen. Also found a yellow ladybug hiding in yellow flowers, so that was kinda cool, but very difficult to photograph.
I knew that when I wanted to get to the next level I needed a flash and some sort of diffuser. Then I remembered I still had that small Olympus flash FL-LM3 that could do the job. I ordered the cheapest diffuser on Amazon, just to try it out. So my combo is not set! After watching a dozens of Micael Widell’s videos I was ready! Go check him out https://micaelwidell.com
The first try was just at home when I saw a small jumping spider crawling across my windowsill. A perfect opportunity. So place it onto a leaf of a plant in my room and shot some photos. I quite like them, but this is still without the diffuser as you can see by the shadow underneath the spider. Overall harsh light that is not that pleasing.
So when the diffuser came together with the Raynox 250, as I wanted to get closer to 2:1, I assembled all and went out again. Whoah! What a difference and next level reached! I got some really nice shots of smallest of bugs. One of them was about 1mm - the first shot below. Really cool! I still need to improve before I order a proper flash and diffuser, but I caught the bug … wink!
So there you have it! All photos shot with the OM-1 and the Olympus M.Zuiko 60mm macro lens. The last 10 (so half way down the gallery photos are shot with the Raynox as well. Click to view larger in a light box and navigate with mouse or arrow keys. Enjoy!
