Push / Pull

While carrying out the regular de-brambling in the garden as I fight back the ever encroaching swarm of thorns (they're still winning) I noticed one of the leaves had a clump of eggs and nymphs underneath. I always keep an eye out for this kind of then when doing gardening, to make sure anything that was using the plants before I attacked it with my shears can be rehomed. They appear to be Common Green Shieldbug (Palomena prasina), freshly emerged.

I've been trying for a long time to move as much of my digital life as possible over to FOSS options.

A neighbour of mine has a pond. A nice pond, with nice fish in. Nice, big fish. Nice, big fish that would surely be good photography subjects. Like shooting fish in a barrel, as it were. I am fortunate, then, that I am given the - in my opinion enviable - duty of providing them food when my neighbours are away.

I've been trying for quite some time to get closer results in my macro photography. My main lens is the Canon 100mm f/2.8L macro lens (hereon: "100mm macro"), which I now use most times with the Canon EF 25 II extension tube to add some extra magnification at the cost of infinity focus. This, coupled with my Canon 80D, can provide a decent amount of magnification.

I've had my Canon EOS 30 for a long time. It's the last film camera I had before I moved to digital, and was the first one I used when I shot my first roll of film in 20 years. Despite being a film camera, it looks and functions almost identically to the DSLR cameras that followed it, right the way up to the RF mirrorless series. Don't fix what's not broke, I suppose (discounting the EOS R touchbar that was, thankfully, short lived).

Okay. Let me explain what I mean by that somewhat provocative title. A couple of months ago, a friend asked me to take some pictures of his chickens for social media. Chickens of a particular breed. Frizzles! As a breed, Frizzles are relatively under-represented (other breeds can have frizzle-feather variants, but this is its own thing), with only a reasonably small-sized society behind them.

After getting back into film last year, using a camera I'd had for a long time, it was very much a return to what I was familiar with: 35mm film photography, auto exposure and autofocus. The last time I'd used film I'd been much younger, using whatever cameras my parents had already, or could afford to buy for me, and using the same format that my dad was using because that's just what we had.

Welcome to the inaugural post of Macro Mondays, a series all about macro photography. Posted on Mondays. We believe, strongly, in Truth in Advertising. Posts by me in this series will likely revolve around interesting finds on recent shoots and talking about specific shots I like, but may also include trying out different macro gear, or macro-related projects. I make no promises on the length of the articles, or the cadence.

We live in grey times, not black and white. Grey walls, grey furniture, grey minds. A post-truth era forced upon us by those with a vested interest in avoiding the existence of the objective. Words couched in ambiguity for fear of upsetting potential customers, because that is all any of us are now. Customers, consumers. Not artists, photographers or communicators. Just... people who buy. It extends out from our screens into our lives, this lie of the content creator, the influencer. I am neither.

After getting into medium format when I bought a Bronica ETRSi almost a year ago, I've wanted to try a larger negative and, ideally, one that pushes me to try different composition styles. 6x6 format seemed like the logical choice, with a very large selection of cameras in a wide range of prices. And so the burning Eye of GAS turned its fiery gaze once more to used camera sites and began scrolling through listings.