Thank you dirt for starting this thread!
I enjoyed taking photos of my roses over the last year after getting a Fujifilm X-T3 cropped sensor camera. I love the Fuji's simplicity with its manual dials on the top of the camera which is reminiscent of old film cameras like my Nikkomat from the 1970s. My favorite lens has been the 23mm f/2 which is equivalent to a 35mm full frame lens. I've been able to achieve some degree of close up photos but I never achieve the sharpness I'm looking for. I took the following photo with my 23mm lens;
I played with the color and cropped the photo to get a more creative look but the leaf isn't as sharp as I'd like. I love to have a photo that is already a close up, where the leaf is sharp, and the droplets have super clarity so you can see through them.
My normal inclination is to walk up to a flower and get close enough to see the detail, then take a photo. I just got an 80mm f/2.8 macro lens (it weighs a ton and I've nicknamed it "The Beast") and took several hundred bad, blurry pics of lilacs and a few other spring flowers. Here are a few pics that I thought were ok.
Cropped version of the photo above.
This one might be my favorite so far but sharpness drops off at the bottom of the leaf.
With autofocus, the closest I can get to the subject is about 9 inches to the subject. My better photos are at f/22 so far. I love The Beast but I have a lot to learn!
Any feedback would be very much appreciated!
Ann
