The Crimson Stem...

The Tamron 90mm macro lens used out in a local park, this afternoon, as the sun periodically came out - and went back in. Etc.

Its 1:1 life size ratio is very useful to have in one unit, though like anything a bit specialist, can be a bit of a beast at its extreme. If anything, when used on the DX format D7000, it's just a bit TOO long, as most of the leaves I was poking into were a few inches above my head. The swaying of them, in the light breeze, made focussing and sometimes, even keeping them in the frame, difficult.

Rather like a long telephoto lens, any slight movement of either subject, or YOU, can have detrimental effect and anyone telling you can do shots like these with a tripod is living on another planet! You follow by moving the camera in and out and around, which actually gets really tiring, especially when shooting into the sun, as I did with some other shots. And if this image strikes of being a very large aperture and shallow depth of focus, it's actually a quite small f13!!

A bit of cropping and contrast/shadow fiddling to get the best overall ratio was done after. Though this lens has a deserved reputation of being of clinically razor sharpness, the narrow depth of that zone often requires extra sharpening, to make it appear sharper, so a touch of that, too.