Back in March I got a Tamron 70-300 lens to take pictures of zoo animals. I paid about $200 for it at my local Castle Photo (now sadly closed), which is still pretty cheap for such a long telephoto. The tradeoff, of course, is in optical quality. The lens is mushy at the extreme long end, giving it an effective range of about 70-270mm. Still, I’m pretty happy with the Tamron, and after learning its limitations I’ve been able to take some pretty good pictures.

The other neat feature about this lens is a 1:2 macro capability at the long end of the range (180-300mm). I hadn’t really played around with this much, but the weather has been absolute crap so yesterday I set up various small objects on the bathroom counter and got out the tripod to see what I could do. I still have a lot to learn about controlling depth-of-field in extreme closeups, but I got lucky a few times, as in the shot above.

I was also playing around with some rudimentary lighting, using a cheap LED headlamp to shine white and red lights on the dragon and other objects. I posted an example of that here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverodriguez/3516629677/.

All in all, a pretty successful day in, and hopefully the first of many macro shoots to come. Now all I need is a better tripod…