I’ve had the M.Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 macro lens since last year, but it wasn’t before I recently invested in a flash (Olympus FL-900R) and a diffuser (Cygnustech) that I felt like I started to get some macro images that I was happy with. In this post I’ll show the images that I got on a morning walk (video below) with settings and some insights into how I took them.

I saw a lot of spiders on my walk and the first ones I came across where underneath a fern with spores lining the leaves. Here, I tried to include both spiders in the frame, the edge of the fern as well as the out of focus bokeh created by the gap ion the trees above.

After the largest spider crawled away, I tried for various compositions with the other one.

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This spider was crawling fast along this leaf and I waited to get my image as it turned towards me.

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Shield bugs are so cool looking!

I mistook this little creature for a twig lying on the fern when I first laid eyes on it, had to double check before I saw that it was actually a moth caterpillar.

I also decided to get an images straight on, it reminded me of a creature from Dune!

My settings were relatively constant throughout the session with an f-stop of around f/9, a shutter around 1/200s and a base level ISO of 200. The aperture of f/9 gave me pretty good depth of field when the creatures were relatively flat and facing me straight on, but as you can see when I photographed the moth caterpillar head on above, it’s still a fairly shallow depth of field.

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I’m just getting started on the macro journey and I have a lot to learn, but I’m loving the process and looking forward to lots more macro photography in the future 🙂