What Aperture do you guys usually shoot?

Well unfortunately I am not used to shooting macro just yet. (taken mabbe 50 images so far) and I went out and there were some very nice sunflowers by my house yesterday with a ton of bees etc on em. So I took about 10 pictures(was losing sunlight) and I used anywhere from 2.8-4 and it turned out that alot of my pics were ruined because about 1/3 of my sunflower was in the dof. For future refrence what do you guys shoot in av mode to capture the whole flower in dof.

Any tips on how to porperly judge the dof on a shot. The dof preview button is often confusing for me to use.

Sigma 105 2.8 by the way.

I normally shoot around F11 for both flash and natural light shots even if it means raising the ISO.
Brian V.

thanks for the reply. I will keep t hat in mind.

This was the 1st time where I could of captured bees getting pollen and when i got back to the comp I was upset at myself. Oh well there will be more to come.

I use f/11 to f/13 with the Canon 100mm lens.

f11 seems to be the sweet spot for my EF-S 60 on a 350D. The Sigma 150 seems to tolerate going to f13 or even f16 before diffraction starts to affect IQ.

As Brian says it is better to crank up the ISO than open the lens when using natural light. With flash it is easy to get small apertures.

Here's what I use for my Sigma 70-300mm apo DG with tubes :

f/9 for when I use my polarizer
f/11-f/14 for normal shots

f11 mostly, but occasionally will shot f13 or even f16. You will start to notice diffraction issues (ie. loss of resolution/sharpness) the smaller you go. For the 300D/350D/20D/30D the limit is around f11 due to their pixel size. Since I use a 1D, which has larger pixels, I can go a bit lower to f16 without really having any diffraction issues.

Dave

With my set-up, I prefer f13 to f16. seems to work well for me.

This is normally what I use but of course it all depends on the lighting and subject

f.2.8- 8 for random things when I've got a chance to set the camera up properly with a decent compostion, Rarely lower than f/3.5 though.

f/8-f/11 for natural light macros of everthing and anything- this usually means giving the ISO a boost.

f/11-f/16 for all kinds of creepy crawlies when using the ring flash.