We have a new family member in my household. My oldest daughter has been saving her money and has purchased a White's tree frog which she named Saturn. Now, we have not traditionally had good luck with pets in my house. My oldest is allergic to everything with fur, so that rules out all of the conventional pets, like a cat or a dog. We have also tried a few alternative pets, with the most recent being a hedgehog, which my wife ended up being allergic to. So, I was not terribly excited about the idea of trying another pet.So far he has been a very good and easy pet, so my fears were probably unfounded.
In honor of the event I borrowed a Canon 100mm macro lens from my friend (What? Doesn't everyone have a friend that will let them borrow a $600 lens?) This lens has a great reputation and my experience with it was no exception. This is a true 1:1 macro lens and allows you to easily capture the most intricate details of your subject. It is also a fast f/2.8 lens, so it is awesome even in low light. For this shoot I had my daughter hold her frog near our sliding glass window. The shoot was kind of tricky, because even though this frog is not overly active, he still kept turning out of the light. In order to compensate I had to keep repositioning myself around the frog.
One of the keys to photographing animals is to keep their eyes in focus. Other body parts can be out of focus and people will not really notice, but if the eyes are out of focus the photograph is ruined. In order to take full advantage of the natural light I had to use a very wide aperture (f/2.8-f/4.0). Since this makes the depth of field very shallow and since I was constantly moving around the frog it was surprisingly difficult to get shots that were focused the way I wanted. Even so, I was happy with several of the shots .
A word of warning...never borrow a nice lens like this from a friend as you will not want to return it. He said I could borrow it anytime, however, so that made it a LITTLE easier to return. The reality is that this is a fairly specialized lens, so I honestly would not use it that much. But, when you need close up shots with lots of detail this lens is very hard to beat.
