Going Tiny

I got a loan from Doc on what is known as an extension tube. It's a very cool little device which does nothing more than extend the distance between your camera lens and your camera. One cool result is that your lens looks much more impressive since it's an extra 3 inches long. The other effect is that it allows your lens to focus much closer than it could before. For example, with my 200mm lens the minimum focus distance is a little over 3 feet, anything closer will be blurry. Just add an extension tube and you get a focus distance of about 2 inches. That means you can get super close to your subject. In this case it was a poor little bee who was dying from the cold, or possibly from using it's stinger since I couldn't see it. Anyway it's loss of mobility was my gain. The downside of these tubes is that they make your depth of field TINY (or rather tiny) so you have to stop down your aperture which increases your exposure time. Long story short it means that you can't take pictures of things that are moving when using one of these tubes. Luckily the bee kept moving slowly and stopped occasionally allowing me to get some pictures.

See more pictures from the extension tube test