Las Vegas: Macro Fun

I mentioned i got a new lens before leaving for Vegas, it's a Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro and is generally regarded as the best Canon lens under $600. It's a prime lens (that means it uses "sneaker zoom" - which means your sneakers do the zooming). But prime lenses also produce much sharper images. Anyway, i'm not much of a macro shooter, i prefer lanscapes and portraits - but once you get a macro lens you'll find yourself wanting to take a picture of everything (especially small things) simply because you can! It's fun. Anyway, i do hope to incorporate it into my portrait shooting but until then i'll have a little fun too. Maybe i'll make it a regular feature, "guess what i took a picture of"? The last two are obvious, but can you guess the first two? They're the same thing, but from different perspectives, the photos were taken in Vegas in Emily's backyard...
At f/2.8 it's not super fast, but as you can see, the depth of field (the part of the picture that's in focus) is razor thin sometimes. In this particular image, the sharp part of image is only about a quarter of an inch wide! Obviously you have to be careful or you'll only get a very small part of your image in focus.


In this image you can see how the depth of field brings only certain parts of the flower into sharp focus, but i still think it looks cool. To decrease your depth of field use a larger aperture (the smaller f-stop numbers), to increase the depth of field (you want everything in focus), use smaller apertures (the bigger f-stop numbers). Keep in mind that using a smaller aperture lets less light in and requires more time and thus usually a tripod.