Thursday Vibes: Bugs and Close-Ups

by | Oct 31, 2024

Happy Halloween. In the past today’s posts would be about making Halloween portraits of models in costumes and you can see some of them here and here but as my coverage of portrait photography has changed over the past year, I’ve limited these topics to my limited Sunday Series about outdoor portraiture and my Password Protected posts, So I’ll be skipping that subject matter today and focus on close-up photography of…bugs!

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug. —John Lithgow

Tamron’s 14-150mm Di III was the company’s first lens they designed for the Micro Four-thirds system. When it was originally announced, this lens was going to feature built-in mage stabilization but over the course of its development—there’s lots of in-body stabilization for cameras in this format—that feature was removed.

Build Quality

The 14-150mm lens has a metal barrel and is built to a high standard featuring top notch fit and finish. It’s all wrapped in your choice of a silver finish or black finish. The lens has the equivalent angle-of-view of a 28-300mm lens, so it’s amazingly versatile for such a small—2.48 x 3.36—inches optic. It has a 52mm filter size, which is the same size as Panasonic’s 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, so I can attach the same filters.

The 14-150mm Di III does a good job focusing as close as 1.6 feet even at 150mm but if you;re planning on using it that close, I’d recommend attaching it to a camera with in-body stabilization such as the Olympus EM-10 Mark I used to make the below image. My tests with mounting the lens on non-IBIS Micro Four-thirds cameras for this same kind of shot, didn’t produce as many sharp images.

 

How I Made this Photograph: I’m not usually a bug photographer but this little critter attracted my attention—I had just watched the 1954 film THEM—when strolling around Bingham Lake with an Olympus EM-10 Mark I. At 150mm (300mm equivalent) this lens gave me a different perspective from the other (shorter focal length) lenses I normally take on my walks. The exposure was 1/200 sec at f/5.8 and ISO 320.

Tamron has a legacy of producing all-in-one lenses for SLRs and the 14-150mm Di III competes with similar lenses from other Micro Four-thirds camera manufacturers but it should hold it’s own against these rivals, especially when used on Olympus cameras or Panasoni model that have in-body stabilization.

WHAT IS MACRO?: With a close-focusing capability of 1.6-feet, Tamron’s 14-150mm Di III could hardly be called a Macro Lens. The standard definition of macro photography is that a lens can produce an image on the film plane or digital sensor that’s the same size as the subject aka a 1:1 ratio. Some lens manufacturers describe a lens’s close-focusing capabilities as “macro” even though they don’t meet that criteria, although Tamron does not for this lens, not even calling it close-focusing. Over time the term has gradually come to mean being able to focus on a subject close enough so the image is life-size or larger when viewed a 4×6-inch print. Does the Tamron 14-150mm meet that standard? I’m pretty sure it does.