I thought I'd get up close and personal to this white/yellow daffodil after seeing it getting pounded by the gale going on right now outside.
This was shot with the only true macro I have. The lens is the Tamron 70-300 macro, which operates as a true macro in the 180-300mm range. Only costs about 150 bucks. While it takes decent images, it has its problems.
The below image, while I like the color subtlety and composition, is not as sharp as the work of top-ranked macro glass, and there are portions of the center of the flower where the color is most intense that are a bit blown out. I did not boost contrast or saturation in pp, and barely sharpened. It has been run through noise ninja, which actually made the blowout a bit better. The slight blowout, where the green meets and becomes the yellow toward the center, is visible on my monitor, and would be plain as day on a print. With any of the top-grade Canon macros, that would not have been the case. I shot some with the 100-400L image stabilizer, but could not get close enough to duplicate this magnification, and I could have gotten a good bit closer than I did with the Tamron. It's natural lighting coming in through the windows on a bright cloudy day, with an incandescent bulb adding warmer light from the left side. I photographed it against a black background, which showed through to some degree on the rear petals and made it easier to properly expose the petals, which would have appeared much whiter with a pale background.
Focus distance was about three feet, which is a lot of working distance for that level of magnification, and the longer the working distance, the less we disturb things when butterflies and bees are on the flower.
20D, Tamron 70-300 macro zoom at 183mm, iso100, .60/sec, f20, Manfrotto 724B tripod.
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