I got a new lens today! I picked up the Canon EF 24-70mm f/4L IS USM which is a good general purpose lens but it also has a handy Macro mode when you extend the zoom all the way out. This gives it a little bit more focal length and provides up to 0.7X magnification, which is handy for macro photography. It’s not quite 1:1 magnification but I couldn’t justify forking out for the dedicated Macro lens which I want just yet. In the meantime this lens will cover me for all kinds of uses beyond macro photography, in fact it will likely be the lens that I have on my camera most often. To celebrate the purchase I ran around my house looking for insects to snap a picture of to test out the magnification. I found this little guy (who was around 10mm long) on the wall of my garage. It was quite dark so I used my flash but given the size of the lens and how close I had to get it didn’t quite brighten up the spider as much as I’d like. I don’t have an off-camera flash unit yet, although even a maglite would have probably done the trick in this instance if I had one.

I’m going to do some more experimenting with my lenses to figure out which one is best in different situations, however I’m pretty happy with the selection I have bought for now. I did also buy a remote for my camera so I can do more long exposure stuff on a tripod. I’m excited to see what kind of photos I will be manage to create in the coming weeks 🙂