The main reason I wanted to go to Canada was so that Alena could see all the great things that I’ve seen. So we were making stops at locations which I’ve visited before many times.
This time around we decided to stop by the botanical garden. I’ve seen signs pointing to it many times, but never actually went there. The garden itself seems to be rather large, and we were short on time, so we visited only one part of it: Butterfly Conservatory.
I armed myself with my new macro lens and went hunting. The first butterfly that we came upon was actually flying outside of conservatory, and the pictures of it came out the best. The conservatory itself was filled with all kinds of beautiful and exotic butterflies. They would even land on people and would refuse to fly away.
But I guess because the lighting condition weren’t great and I’m only an amateur majority of the pictures came out fuzzy. It still was a very fun experience nevertheless.
Then on our way back I stumbled upon a nice bumblebee flying around the flowers. He didn’t really want to strike a pose for me, but I think I still got a nice shot. Looks like he was flying around and collecting nectar from flowers.
My dad took a lot of butterfly pictures as well on his camera. Looks like he and my mom were having fun too. Also we got yet another magnet for our refrigerator. Alena refuses to leave without those from anywhere now.
We brought 3 new ones from Canada.
I pulled out my old Sigma 105mm macro lens from my treasure chest — the only prime lens that I have at the moment — to remember what this lens is all about. Sadly it rarely gets any use. I don’t do any macro photography and this thing is capable of 1:1 reproduction.
At first I tried taking a coupe of portrait shots and it really is not usable inside. 105mm is just too long. However a bigger problem was a lack of contrast or a visible haze. I didn’t figure it out until later, but the culprit turned out to be the UV filter on the lens. Moral of the story? Don’t put cheap glass on top of a lens — either buy the ones that are too expensive to make sense or don’t buy any at all.
Overall the shots come out pretty sharp and the manual focus for macro shots works well as well. In the test shots that I took bokeh did look pleasant. Auto-focus itself is rather slow.
I should try to take it out more and try taking a couple of portraits shots outside. Maybe I’ll start using it more often.
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