First day with the new lens

[urbpan]

Ever since I got a digital pentax slr I've had my eye on a particular macro lens. It's not even made by pentax, but it is prohibitively expensive: in the four to five hundred dollar range on Amazon, whenever I check. I checked eBay randomly a week ago, and found it for $275. I thought about what I really like to take pictures of--bugs and mushrroms--and how I've spent a lot of time and money trying to find a reasonably priced way to do it. I bought the lens. Here is the first photo I took with it, a strawberry in our garden.




These clustered troops came up around the big log sections that serve as our fire pit seats.




The lens has a 90mm focal length, which is used for portraits as well. It allows you to get closer than the subject thinks you are, without being freakish. Alexis' scalp is dyed from her hair dye.


I was ten or fifteen feet from this adorableness.




This lens really allows me to show you how gross my thumbnail is.


After the sun set, this large new insect visited. It's a spring fishfly Chauliodes rastricornis, attracted to the porch light. Like most insects it isn't beneficial or noxious, it just comes to lights.


These pretty yellow flies hang out on the underside of the developing sunflower leaves. They're sunflower maggot flies, a genus (Strauzia) of flies that lays their eggs in the stems of plants in the sunflower family.


And a new lens needs to be broken in with a voyeuristic shot, of course. These two cabbage whites intend to make many green caterpillars to eat all the weedy and cultivated plants in the mustard family.