Extreme Telephoto Flower Pictures

When we think of nature and flower pictures, "Macro" comes to mind. How close can we get to the subject? How BIG in the viewfinder can we make it? For that we invest in macro lenses, extension tubes and all sorts of other paraphenalia. However, there is another way.

These pictures were taken with the Tokina AT-X 100-300 F4 zoom mounted on the Olympus E-1. For those not familiar with the E-system, it is a reduced frame system with the imaging sensor about 1/2 the size of a 35mm film camera. This means that the image is essentially "magnified" 2X over the equivelent focal length in our 35mm film cameras. The 100-300 zoom now becomes the equivelent of a 200-600 F4 zoom.



The top picture is of a young maple tree. During RAW conversion in RawShooter Essentials 2006, I altered the white-balance to emphasise the greans and turned the saturation to zero. The shadow and highlight contrasts were adjusted to achieve the tonal density curve I wanted. The focal length was set to around 250mm.

The second image is of a flowering bush that had this branch sticking through the railing slats of a foot-bridge. Focal length was all the way out to 300mm.



This final image is with the lens focused down all the way to the minimum focus-distance and at 300mm.

An extreme telephoto is usually not the typical tool used for photographing flowers, but it is useful some of the time.