I remember when I was first looking into macro lenses and being a little confused as to why they didn’t seem to have apertures much wider than f/2.8. Why not larger, I wondered to myself as I scrolled through available options for my Nikon F-mount cameras. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find close-focusing lenses that had maximum apertures of f/1.8 or even greater. It seemed obvious to me, as an inexperienced close-up photographer, that one would want to let in as much light as possible and have ultimate control over depth of field which would, so I reasoned, would necessitate a lens with a larger maximum aperture.
Live and learn, eh?
Turns out, close-up photography doesn’t really require f/2.8 apertures very often. Hardly ever, in fact, since depth of field is so crazy shallow when shooting macro images at such a wide aperture. It’s just not practical and doesn’t really produce pleasing results anyway unless you are going for extreme focus stacking. Case in point: this week’s image, an acmella oleracea flower just outside the student union at Oklahoma State University. It was a bit of an overcast day which made for nice even lighting, and I had my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens in tow, so when I saw this brown and yellow bud sticking up from the greenery I figured it would be a fun opportunity to practice my photography.
The yellow and black bud you see here isn’t even that small: probably about the size of an average acorn. And I wasn’t even super close to it, as you can see from all the surrounding leaves in the frame. As such I thought I thought a wider aperture of f/8 or f/11 might work well to give me a shallow depth of field and draw your attention right to the center of the frame. But as I have so often experienced when taking these types of images, larger apertures ≠ better results. Even f/11 gave me a depth of field that was simply too shallow, and I had to stop down all the way to f/19 to get the shot you see here. If you click on the image to see the full-size version on Flickr you’ll notice that everything is sharp and detailed, and you can see every single individual brown and yellow spike on the top of the bud with the rest of the composition nicely blurred–particularly the other flower on the right-hand side, which was an intentional choice by me. I wanted to position myself in such a way as to add something else interesting to the shot rather than just one single flower, and I think it worked out pretty well.
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