You’re probably wondering what on earth a macro lens has to do with farming. And you’d be right to wonder. I certainly wouldn’t blame you. If I’m entirely honest, I just wanted to play with the lens a bit. I wanted to take photos of things like the freckles on my goats’ noses (the ones who have nose freckles, anyway). Their long eyelashes. Little bugs on wildflowers. The flowers themselves.
Alas, it is deep winter here in Alaska as I write this post, and my goats are in no mood to pose for photos. <sigh> On the bright side, though, it has been snowing for almost 24 hours so I’m sure I can find something to take a closeup photo of.
Let me introduce you to the little lens I’ll be using. I found the Mozeat Lens 2 in 1 Cellphone Camera Lens Kit which includes a 20x macro lens and a 160° fisheye lens. I didn’t even want the fisheye lens but I sure did want that 20x macro. I noticed, as I was getting you the link for the lens kit, that it’s now less expensive than it was when I bought mine, and having paid the higher price, I’m still happy with the value for the money – even if I only use one lens. I’ll also note here, just for the record, I’m not affiliated with Mozeat in any way whatsoever. While the link IS an Amazon affiliate link (from which I might earn a small commission without affecting your purchase price in any way), I have nothing to do with Mozeat themselves. I just really like this little lens.
Having bundled myself up against the cold and the snow flurries, I headed out to the barn with my Apple iPhone 6 and my shiny new macro lens, with visions of super cool goat photos dancing in my brain. However, the girls had other plans. They don’t like the snow falling on them and once they figured out that I didn’t have a pocket full of animal crackers, they didn’t want anything to do with standing still, much less letting me get close enough to my desired subjects to actually get it in focus. This is the best photo I could get of any of their faces. Pretty underwhelming, right?
The reason this worked so badly is that the lens needs to be within about an inch of the subject in order to focus. The subject also needs to be still, and baby Rubee was neither still nor within an inch of the lens. So, let’s try it again, using the lens properly.
THIS. This is what I hoped for. Mind you, this snowflake was about 2mm wide. I tried hard to find some snowflakes that were larger. The snowfall certainly looked like it was made up of large flakes, but upon closer inspection, turned out to be clumps of several teeny tiny flakes. This little cutie landed on Gale’s back, and she ignored me long enough for me to focus in and get this snapshot. Look how big her hairs look! Important to note here that not one photo in this post has been edited in any way except to crop them. Here’s another look at the same little snowflake:
Given that the snowflake is so tiny, and so thin, and not entirely flat, I’m delighted with the detail I could capture.
About this time, the goats had given up entirely on the hope that I’d produce some animal crackers for them, and drifted off back to the barn, so I went off to find some other snowflakes to photograph. This one was on the bottom of the ATV sled. Those little specks of dirt were so small I didn’t really notice them at the time, but they look like pebbles here.
This cluster of snowflakes is on a feed bag. If you look very closely, you can see the weave of the feed bag and that will give you an idea of how small the main snowflake is. Getting the distance from the lens correct is important to bring out the detail in the subject. A tiny variation in distance matters. This is the same snowflake with a difference of less than 1/8″ between subject and lens in the two photos:
Some snow on the back stair railing:
By this time I was cold and ready to go in the house, which prompted Gale to stand in the barn door and tease me with “I’m ready to hold perfectly still now, Mom!” but nah, I’m going inside where it’s warm. I took the lens off my phone – it clips easily on and off – and snapped her pic. I’ll take your photo again another day, silly girl.
Once inside the house and warmed up a bit, I couldn’t resist taking a quick closeup of the sleeping puppy’s nose. Check that out! So cool!
Two last photos… These are tiny bubbles that happened when I twisted the cap off a bottle of diet soda.
I had such fun taking this little macro lens out for a spin. I’m excited for summertime to come around so I can take photos of the wildflowers with it, but… It’s January and -11° today. I’ve got a few more months to wait for wildflowers. How about you? Are the flowers blooming yet where you are?
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AMAZING!! The Snowflakes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!