A few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at selling stock photos on Adobe Stock. I have a Nikon D7000, and one thing I learned real quick was that though I can get nice close shots with my 18-200mm Nikon lens, the photos are not super sharp like you’d see with an actual macro lens.
So I purchased a Nikon Micro 40mm dx lens.. It’s one of Nikon’s suggested macro lenses for the D7000. This lens focuses real close, and though they say 40mm is on the short side for doing macro of things like insects that would get skittish with a lens getting close to them, I liked that it would also serve as an all around sharp lens.. And wow is it sharp. At least to my eyes.
The lens came when my camera body was in for factory service (I decided to get it all tuned up). And as soon as the camera came back I was out taking flower photos. Here is one I really like, a bee on a cone flower in our garden.
Now this is not a VR lens, so it takes a steady hand, good shutter speed, or a tripod. but that photo was one of the first ones I took with the lens and I did it hand held while the bee worked it’s way around the flower. I like the sharpness of the bee, but the depth of field is shallow, I like it that way, the only way to get it all in focus would be with a smaller F-stop, but hey.. the bee was moving too fast to experiment on the fly (pun intended).
Here are some more flower shots I did today. Again handheld and at like F8 or F11 and very fast shutter speed.
The reason I said wow in the title here is that as an all around lens it is also fantastic. I did a timer shot with the camera on a tripod, my wife standing exactly where I needed her, and I ran into the shot before the exposure. I’ll not post that photo here, but what I got was so hi-res that for the first time I need to consider processing to make portraits more flattering. In other words it captured everything about our faces in hi-def.. and so would actually need some softening.
All of these photos and our portrait photo were taken with autofocus, and they were all taken with the lens in infinity-.5feet mode, rather than full mode.
The bee photo was already approved by Adobe Stock and is available for purchase here. And a photo of just cone flowers is here.
I just uploaded today’s flower photos and unfortunately it will be some time before Adobe considers them due the the deluge of AI generated photos they are getting these days.
This blog entry looks like a product review, so I need to say, I have no material connection to Nikon, it just happens I bought their lens and like it so much I’m blogging about it.
Here is my Amazon affiliate link if you’d like to purchase the lens from Amazon, click the photo of the lens:
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