Up at 5:00 AM this morning, I put the Bialetti to good use and then headed out with a warm coffee in hand and a bagful of gear on my back, 2 cameras, the tripod and my new macro focusing rail shivering with excitement. Dawn, like water left running out of a rusty pipe, was finally turning clear. There was, however, no one out yet. Streets were literally empty and even runners and dog slaves were few.

I wound my way through the most flowery parts of Stanley Park’s outskirts, walking around Lost Lagoon towards Coal Harbour. Then a terrible thing happened. I saw my first two raccoons of the season, and a bit further a third one, agonizing on the path. The poor thing seemed quite old and apparently had just been mauled by a dog or hit by a bicycle. A park employee eventually picked it up but I’m afraid it won’t make it. I’d like to get my hand on the dog or the bicycle owner and teach them what mauling really means. Really.

I had a hard time finding what I was looking for in terms of macro subjects. There wasn’t much dew and spring flowers are not as interesting shape and texture-wise. Worse, the wind picked up very early, not too strong and definitely nowhere near the forecast 15 km/h – but a very slight breeze even if not visible in the trees, is enough to move flowers around and in the dim morning light, makes macro very tricky.

I had too keep my aperture in the mid-values – loosing precious depth of field – and the ISO high, and for that I knew I would have to pay with noise later. Sunrise had been nice but the sun soon vanished behind a high layer of clouds and while providing for a more diffuse lightning, this also made things darker. At first I had to use a flashlight to see anything at all in Live View mode and be able to focus. This was my first real field test of the focusing rail and I must say I adore it. It’s a cheap model ordered from China on eBay for a minimal cost but it still does an amazing job compared to my previous miserable attempts at focusing by tilting the tripod’s head and moving the entire bloody setup forward and backwards…

Macro photography, a relatively new domain for me, is incredibly time consuming but equally rewarding. I love the fact that when I thought I had seen everything around me, I can pause and look closer at a single flower and try to imagine what universe will appear once my lens is on it. And most of the time, I get it completely wrong, falling short of the mesmerizing reality.

In the end, most of my shots were blurry from the flowers moving slightly in the wind and the flimsiness of my tripod. I’ve still kept a few for the record and because even if not perfectly sharp, they are a nice example of the fantastic world that opens up under a macro lens. They were taken as before by mounting my regular EF-S 18-55 mm IS lens backwards with a simple coupling ring.

Sure, there’s a lot of practice needed on my part, but what a wonderful way to spend a morning…

Note: to give an idea of scale in the macro shots, I would say that the dew drops in the second picture, far smaller than regular raindrops, are about a quarter of a millimeter in actual size…