I was anxiously awaiting my lens to arrive from B&H and it arrived yesterday. I had a long day starting work at 6am but I still managed to find time to rip open my package and install my lens for a couple of shots. This is a fixed length lens, meaning it has no zoom to it, so to get closer or further you have to literally move your body to position the photo correctly. We primarily selected this lens because it’ll be a huge asset to taking product photos for our new e-commerce site that is already being built. Needless to say that with the first press of the shutter I was sold that this lens was worth every penny.

Here’s a few shots that I took within a couple of minutes installing the lens. Keep in mind, I’m pretty need to SLR photography and would consider myself an amateur in the field. I scaled most of these shots down so they’d load fast and fit on my blog.

First shot is a shot of some fake flowers that each flower is about 2 cm in diameter (yes I measured). I set the camera to focus on the flowers in the foreground and the blur the flowers in the background. I think that it creates a neat effect:

From the full resolution picture, I cropped out just 1 flower just to show the detail that this camera and lens combination brings. You can actually see the pattern of the fake flower, can you find which flower I cropped?

Next, I took a picture of one of my cats, “Chooch”, one of her many nicknames, and I did the same where I focused on her head and blurred the background. This helps draw your attention to the subject of the picture rather than having everything clear.  The blurred part of the photo is called bokeh.

I wanted to show the detail again, so I took the full resolution shot and just cropped out her eye. If you look close enough you can actually see my tripod in her eye, but the detail in the yellow part of her eye is pretty amazing!

These fine details are what set apart a great point and shoot camera from a digital SLR camera.

Finally, I took a shot of a ceramic statue that my mom loves of Linus from the Peanuts. I figured this would be a good representation of what we’ll get out of a product shot.

This was obviously scaled down to fit on the blog as well. Once I get a chance to play with the new lens and learn all of the features, I’m sure the pictures will come out even better.

For these pictures my camera setup was using:

• Canon 400D (Rebel XTi) body
• Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens
• Canon Speedlite 430EX flash
• Manfrotto 3021B Pro Tripod with 486 Ball Head w/ RC2 Rapid Connect
• 2gb Extreme III memory card

All in all I’m very pleased with this lens. I haven’t taken a picture yet where it hasn’t been as sharp as I was hoping for. Highly recommend this macro lens!