A friend has lent me his 100mm macro, while he has an experiment with my 50mm 1.4. It’s a very interesting piece of kit, but tough to use.

I’m not going to post what is without doubt one of the dullest pictures that I’ve ever taken, which was of… a ruler. Yep, I know: it’s not exactly hair-on-fire stuff, but I wanted to see what the maximum depth of field would be for a frame filling shot.

My tripod has a feature whereby I can invert the central column in order to have the camera set quite low. It’s a little awkward, as you mount the camera between two of the legs, but it works well enough. I set the ruler about 20cm from the end of the lens, and exposed the shot, looking down and along the numbers, for 30 seconds at F32 using my remote shutter trigger. [I don’t know what it is about the trigger cable but I seem to spend more time looking for it than using it.]

I also used  the live view for focus, partly because the magnification is fantastic for fine focus, and partly because it’s impossible to look through the viewfinder with the camera mounted between the tripod legs.

The result was actually better than I thought: I’d figure that the focus was completely sharp for about 2 – 2.5cm. This is not exactly scientific stuff, as the plane of focus is going to be wider as the angle between the camera’s line of focus and the flat subject becomes more acute. I deliberately went for a lower shot to try to extend this. The focus visibly falls away much faster behind the focal plane, in comparison to in front.  I’ve read that this was the case with any lens but never seen it so clearly before.

Having satisfied my curiosity, I then did what everyone probably does as soon as they get a macro: head straight out to the back garden to see if I could find any bugs. Answer: no, they’d obviously heard I was coming and cleared off.