Can you believe that in all of my years of photography, I have never owned a macro lens before?
To be honest, I didn't actually understand what macro photography and lenses actually even mean. Yes I know it's some really closeup details of bugs and eyes, but not what macro really technically means. I started to look into it after I noticed some beauty photographers used macro lenses to do portraits. It all comes down to a simple fact that to be considered a macro lens, the magnification is at least 1:1 ratio of the object in nature versus the size of it in the camera censor. I hope I'm explaining that correctly.
With most normal lenses, you can't get close enough to an object to really see the details. Sure you can always crop but then you are loosing pixels. I have noticed this problem when ever I have tried to capture some details like specific textures, or when I have done beauty shots.
I did my research and saw a lot of people favouring the 105mm macro lenses, because you can use it for so many different things, not just the super sharp details, but also for portraits. I found a used Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro at a reasonable price. Not the best macro lens out there, but should be pretty good.
I got my lens a couple weeks ago but I haven't had time/chose to do something else so I haven't tested it much yet. This morning it was a really gorgeous -18 degrees Celsius and my balcony window was full of beautiful ice flowers, a perfect subject to test out a macro lens.
Yall, macro photography is super hard! It takes some serious patience and you really need to use a tripod if you get super close. Even if you stop down to aperture 22, and have a shutter speed of 1000th of a sec, it's very easy to loose your focus. The field of focus is mere millimetres when you are super close. For example in the first picture, my camera is not perfectly level with the glass, so where it starts to curve away even a fraction of a millimetre, it's out of focus. Even when I stopped down to f/18, I can't get everything perfectly in focus on both sides of the maybe 3mm glass.
I'm pretty excited to play more with this lens, it's opening up a lot of new possibilities, but it's definitely not as easy as one might think.
