…make you a semi-pro? I’m going to suggest that the answer to that question – being a little tongue-in-cheek here 🙂 – is a resounding ‘yes’ as I hit another milestone last week with the sale of my first ever stock image. I earned pennies for it, but was still pretty pleased….

This is a shot of our cat Ping who will happily accept modelling assignments for meat-based treats. Unfortunately our garden is a bit unkempt at the moment: I actively chose the wall as the best background on offer, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, I was experimenting with my ultrawide lens at minimum focus when Ping decided to grab the camera:

1/120sec at f20, ISO 640 at 11mm

Going as wide as this lens can [8mm] was losing too much of the subject matter to the [untidy!] periphery, and I couldn’t get close enough to Ping to remove this. As it was, this was – well, arms length for a cat. I tried using extension rings that I’ve written about previously: I’d picked up a tip from TWIP which overcomes the problems with the contactless extender, where the lens defaults to wide open: you set the aperture you want with the lens attached normally to the camera, hold down the depth of field preview button and, with the button still down, switch off the camera. You then attach the lens via the extender and the aperture is preserved. I have to admit I was pretty nervous doing this [and no liability accepted if you break something doing it!].

Shame the extenders don’t work with EFS: they fit fine, it’s just not possible to achieve focus, no doubt because of the different distance of the back element compared to EF glass.